A mobile application encouraging sport activities of teenagers, by training a facebook avatar using real-world exercise.

Once an Avatar is chosen and given a name, the player has to go outside to exercise in order to nurture it. The application recognizes when a player is at the park and offers her to hook up her device to physical machines available at the park. The device measures the player movement to encourage an accurate practice. Points are then automatically saved to her facbook Olympicool app. Extra points are earned for social workout. Back in the virtual world – friend’s avatars compete in a weekly tournament based on the player points received at the park.

How does it work? In this prototype, Connection between server and devices is based on 3G and all devices (smart phones) are equipped with GPS,  Accelerometer and Geometer. Workout updates are sent to server who translate to points during workout and updates Facebook apps and post workout status.

The system uses Android based phones (HTC Hero) and a single Linux Server. The mobile clients are written in Java and the server application is implemented in PHP with Facebook API.

Main challenges for this prototype:

1) Identifying the outdoor fitness device

2) measuring exact movement of the player on the device .