Promoting Physical Activities by Massive Competition in Virtual Marathon

Overweight and obesity due to lack of physical activities incur a serious social problem and a number of systems to promote physical activities using information and communication technologies have been developed. Virtual Kobe Marathon is an Android app to make a user experience a marathon race virtually. It shows the Kobe Marathon course on its display and moves an agent along the course according to the user's moving distance. It also has a competition scheme to make a user compete virtually with others running at different places and times. This scheme facilitates competitions with a small number of opponents, and we, in this paper, introduce a massive competition scheme utilizing the record of 17,769 runners who participated in the 3rd Kobe Marathon. The evaluation experiment shows the massive competition scheme promotes physical activities more than the one-to-one competition scheme.