ensures that a players ability is properly reflected in their score, and
enables the development of other games than dance, which
gives the best value for money solution
Watch the following video of a four live mat version of MultiFit. Each player on the live mats (the front row) has their own arrow stream, the two players on the left have set their difficulty level to Expert and the two on the right to Moderate, the dancers on the practice mats in the back row following the live mat in front. You will see the arrowstreams for each mat in close up near the end of the video. The screen shows as many arrow streams as there are live players, just like DDR (tm) on the Wii (tm) but up to 8 players. So all players have their own bit of the screen and can make their own choices, such as difficulty level and get their own full feedback.
The alternative to Multiifit is a quasi-interactive system, where several players share the same arrow stream. The advantages and disadvantages respectively are:
Truly interactive systems:
Result in optimal performances by all players
Provide fair performance comparisons between competing players
Provide full multiplayer capabilities
provide many different fitness games in addition to dance
are more future proof
provide best value on a lifetime costing basis
Quasi-interactive systems:
Result in sub optimal performances by most (but even worse, not all) of the players
Are very limited in their scope for the development of alternative games
Cost the same or more than fully interactive games
Multiifit's true interactivity ensures that a player's ability comes through in their performance and therefore score. To illustrate the disadvantages of quasi interactive systems, we can use a driving game on a home console as an analogy. If you had a quasi interactive four player racing game it would have just four sets of car controls but just one screen, so only one of the drivers would have control of their car, the other three would just see that player's car going around, and have to guess where they themselves were on the race track, resulting in poor performances. The equivalent for Multiifit is that all four drivers would each have their own screen showing the race track and where they were on it, so they can perform to the best of their abilities.
Using StreetFeet as an example, the scoring in dance mat games is based on the accuracy of the players timing: the more accurate the timing, the higher the score for that step. With StreetFeet on Multiifit each player sees the feedback on the screen of their own score for each step, and therefore timing, and nobody else's. This means that they can use that information to adjust when they step on their dance mat.
This does not happen with quasi-interactive systems. These typically have several players sharing one set of dance arrows on the screen, which show the full feedback for just one of them. The one player that is getting full feedback can adjust their timing, but the other players do not get the full feedback as they dance, and so do not have the information they need to optimise their timing and therefore score.
Whilst full feedback of their own performance is important to the players for the realisation of their capabilities, the ability to develop other games than dance is important for both the longevity of the system and its appeal to as wide a range of customers as possible. In other words there is far better value for money in Multiifit on a full lifecycle costing basis. Using the home console analogy again, would you buy one that only played one game and nothing else? Or would you buy one that had many different games that appealed to different users? How soon would users get fed up with just dance, even with development of the dance software?
