Make sure you have a background that isn't too cluttered.
Make sure only one person is in the view.
Try not to wear stripes (like a stripe up the side of your sweat pants can confuse the game making it think you have 4 legs).
(Future) I hope to make it so you can adjust the camera resolution to see what works best for your situation (high resolution will help with accuracy, but might make it slow to process and create lag).
For now, I'd be interested in hearing what devices people have success with and which ones aren't working.
Try to put the camera directly in front of you. Most testing is done with the phone on the floor.
Make sure you have enough space. If your whole body isn't on the screen, try to adjust the camera and your positioning so that your whole body is on screen.
Once you find what works best, try to keep a consistent distance away from the camera.
You need a fast (low latency) internet connection
Even though it is a browser talking to a phone in the same house, the data needs to go through a server on the US West Coast. This is due to security enforced on your browser.
If your actions are delayed, try to take that into consideration and do them a little bit early.
Right now, I'm hosting this in "the cloud" on a free tier… the hosting provider doesn't say that they've made the connections deliberately unstable… but their indicated solution is to "upgrade to the paid tier". I definitely want to keep this service free, so that means keeping it on the free tier and putting up with intermittent pauses.
I've found that the pauses, while annoying, don't prevent the overall game from working. Let me know if you disagree.
You need to fix that yourself. Try changing the settings for your computer monitor or smart tv? There might be a technical solution that I can implement on the website to prevent this, but I'm not sure. Alternatively, wiggle your mouse between rounds?
I tested turning the screen off (or allowing it to turn itself off due to inactivity), but I found that the app didn't get as much processing time resulting in delayed actions getting sent and an extra choppy experience.
I found that using the app for 30 minutes uses about 30% of my battery. For me, this is acceptable. Let me know if this is a huge obstacle for you.
Maybe you can find a way to plug in your phone while playing?
I find that for my height (5'9"), I need about 7 feet back from where I set my phone and 4.5 feet of lateral movement.
Metric: I find that for my height (175cm), I need about 213 cm back from where I set my phone and 137 cm of lateral movement.
I think I wrote the app so that it will work on most modern phones. Possibly the limiting factor will be how fast your phone is at processing the images. I don't have a "high-end" phone, but it also isn't that old.
Let me know what phones are working for you or aren't working for you and perhaps I can improve this guidance.
It depends on the game, how fast you are moving, how fast your phone is, etc.
But I don't think it uses a crazy amount of data (because if it does, the free tier of the server I'm hosting this on will fall over).
When I play Galaxy Burn for 30 minutes, it uses around 2.5MB on my phone. But still... I recommend wifi.
Not sure.
Apple charges about $100/year to be in their developer program. I wrote the code in a way that it should be reasonably easy to build for iOS, but I also don't have a Mac (required for iOS development). For now, I'm trying to see if anyone besides me is interested… if it is just for me, then why spend the money since I have an Android.
If you are interested in the iPhone version: contact me.
I'm more of a backend developer, so I don't have much experience with websites, mobile devices, or game graphics. I didn't want to hire anyone to build the games, because then I wouldn't be able to make it free. If you or someone you know is interested in contributing a game, feel free to check out the developer docs.
Maybe I'd consider this in the future, but for now, I like that your workout isn't interrupted, there are no cookies, you can just get your workout/game on!
Send me email with feedback! The more feedback I get, the more inspired I am to keep improving the system.
Kinda? I have a bigger "RPG" level-up style game that I've been working on… but it is a ton of work.
If there is a type of game that you'd like, contact me.
Is there an exercise you're interested in? Let me know.
One limiting factor is that I need to be able to detect you doing the exercise programmatically using only one camera.
Example that didn't work:
I tried to make an abs game where you lay on the floor and lift your legs up to work your abs.
This didn’t work because the camera could only see your feet, so it couldn't really detect if a person was even there.
Send me email. No promises that I'll reply, but I'll read it.