Online fitness video tutorials are an increasingly popular way to stay fit at home without a personal trainer. However, to keep the screen playing the video in view, users typically disrupt their balance and break the motion flow — two main pillars for the correct execution of yoga poses. While past research partially addressed this problem, these approaches supported only a limited view of the instructor and simple movements. To enable the fluid execution of complex full-body yoga exercises, we propose FlowAR, an augmented reality system for home workouts that shows training video tutorials as always-present virtual static and dynamic overlays around the user. We tested different overlay layouts in a study with 16 participants, using motion capture equipment for baseline performance. Then, we iterated the prototype and tested it in a furnished lab simulating home settings with 12 users. Our results highlight the advantages of different visualizations and the system’s general applicability.
Hye-Young Jo, Laurenz Seidel, Michel Pahud, Mike Sinclair, and Andrea Bianchi. 2023. FlowAR: How Different Augmented Reality Visualizations of Online Fitness Videos Support Flow for At-Home Yoga Exercises. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23 ), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580897