Out of Your Mind!? Embodied Interaction in Sports

People engage in sportive activities for reasons beyond improving their athletic performance. They also seek experiences like fun, adventure, a feeling of oneness, clear their heads, and flow. Since sport is a highly bodily experience, we argue that taking an embodied interaction perspective to inspire interaction design of sports systems is a promising direction in HCI research and practice. This workshop will address the challenges of designing interactive systems in the realm of sports from an embodied interaction perspective focusing on athletes’ experience rather than performance. We will explore how interactive systems enhance sports experience without distracting from the actual goal of the athlete, such as freeing the mind. We will focus on several topics of interest such as sensory augmentation, augmented experience, multi-modal interaction, and motor learning in sports.