Development of an Indoor Exergame Based on Moving-Target Hitting Task for COVID-19 Epidemic: A Comparison Between AR and VR Mode

The COVID-19 has led to home quarantine in global scale, which increased people’s need for indoor fitness activities in order to relieve stress/anxiety and learn knowledge well during the prevention. In this article, an augmented reality (AR) indoor exergame is developed, mainly a kind of moving target hitting task with Lomachenkos headwear speedball as the prototype. Then, a comparative experiment is performed to test the effect of the exergame in relieving anxiety, as well as the differences between AR and virtual reality modes (using HTC Vive Pro) on user experience (flow experience and motion sickness) and interaction efficiency. Results from 28 participants show that the anxiety level of participants significantly reduced after using the exergame. Although the difference on flow experience is not significant, there is a marginally significant difference on nausea level, a dimension of motion sickness. Moreover, interaction efficiency between the two modes is significantly different. In the task of moving target hitting, AR mode performed better in avoiding motion sickness and improving interaction performance.