Athletes of all levels can find drills repetitive, tedious, and unengaging. Sport training games address this, aiming to make practicing techniques fun. However, there is little information about what feedback athletes need to support skill acquisition and improve engagement. To address this, we develop a game for training the optimal shooting arc technique for basketball free throws, and compare several scoring mechanics based on: 1) adherence to technique, 2) results (successfully making a shot), and 3) a combination of technique and results feedback. We find that technique feedback is essential to adopting a new technique, while results feedback improves engagement. We also find that combining technique and results feedback is effective, but can be overly complex for novices. Our results allow us to make recommendations to designers and researchers on how they can effectively scaffold skill development and engagement in sport training games.

Recent combinations of interactive technology, humans, and water have resulted in “WaterHCI”. WaterHCI design seeks to complement the many benefits of engagement with the aquatic domain, by offering, for example, augmented reality systems for snorkelers, virtual reality in floatation tanks, underwater musical instruments for artists, robotic systems for divers, and wearables for swimmers. We conducted a workshop in which WaterHCI experts articulated the field's grand challenges, aiming to contribute towards a systematic WaterHCI research agenda and ultimately advance the field.

Athletes often learn suboptimal techniques that place a ceiling on their performance or put them at risk of injury. Adopting a new technique can lead to a short-term dip in performance while learning it, which can be demotivating and cause an athlete to revert to their previous, suboptimal technique. To address the challenge of demotivation in adopting new techniques, we explore technique-oriented sport training games, which aim to improve sport skills by capturing behaviour and providing feedback that motivates adopting a new technique. As of yet, previous work has provided little information on how to design sports training games, and some early research suggests that immersive games may distract players, preventing them from being able to learn a new technique effectively. We designed a study comparing a baseline non-game training system with three versions of a running game, ranging from a simplistic text-based game to a 3D audiovisual game with motion feedback. We find that the games with more immersive elements were as effective as the baseline system for adopting a new technique but were preferred by players and improved their intrinsic motivation. We propose design considerations from these findings and provide new directions for researching effective sport training games.

Aquatic recreation encompasses a variety of water-based activities from which participants gain physical, mental, and social benefits. Although interactive technologies for supporting aquatic recreation activities have increased in recent years, the HCI community does not yet have a structured understanding of approaches to interaction design for aquatic recreation. To contribute towards such an understanding, we present the results of a systematic review of 48 papers on the design of interactive technology for aquatic recreation, drawn from the ACM, IEEE, and SPORTDiscus libraries. This review presents an aquatic recreation user experience framework that details problems and opportunities concerning water and HCI. Our framework brings us closer to understanding how technology can interact with users and the aquatic environment to enhance the existing recreational experiences that connect us to aquatic environments. We found that designers can elicit delight, enablement, challenge, and synergy in aquatic recreation experiences.