My Second Bike: A TV-Enabled Social and Interactive Riding Experience

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel concept for a social TV application targeting the demographic of viewers enjoying live sports events, such as road bicycle racing. We intend to enhance the viewing experiences of spectators with sensor-fitted bikes tied to an interactive biking environment on television. The system enables a new form of personalized, physical, and virtual-reality interaction between viewers and a TV program, as well as interactions within or between communities of friends. We also describe a prototype we have implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our idea. The prototype, my second bike, uses a 3D mirrored world environment (Google Earth) to visually represent participating spectators, competing athletes and outdoor bikers. We contend that the system has the potential to attract and support a large user base on account of its scalability, ease of deployment and ability to promote audience participation in live sports events on TV.