Serious game to enhance multitasking skills

Abstract

Multitasking is the practice of spending time on one task before switching to another task. It is essential and happens frequently in daily life. For example, driving car while listening to GPS voice navigation. When we try to multitask, there is a switching a cost, resulting in loss of efficiency and productivity. In this project, a 2.5D game, “PolyCar” was developed using Unity Game Engine to improve people’s ability to multitask. The game consists of three tasks, which are two simultaneous visuomotor task and an auditory task. Besides, the game has multiple variants; two tasks condition and three tasks condition with different difficulty levels. A high score system was implemented to save the highest score achieved by players for respective difficulty levels to monitor their peak performance. A training schedule was proposed to investigate effectiveness of the game to enhance multitasking skills.