Twelve casual, five elite, one floor
Seventeen arrived: twelve casual and five elite, under REB 2025-8251. RQ1 and RQ2 characterise experience and group difference. They do not ask whether RowSim improves rowing. Smith and Spinks could already separate novice, good and elite rowers on the ergometer;[110] this study uses that separation as a given and asks what, if anything, the floor adds.[Th.]
Who arrived
Twelve casual. Five elite.
Expertise is stratified; the projected floor session is shared.
01 · ArrivedSeventeen completed sessions: twelve casual and five elite.
Twelve casual and five elite rowers share one floor-MR session. Protocol allowed 24; 17 arrived.
Consent, then an open bout
The session is a sequence, not a piece: consent, a demographic questionnaire and rowing-background questions, orientation, an open RowSim bout of about ten minutes, then REQ and UES, the interview, and debrief. Nothing in the bout is a target.
Session shape
Open task, one floor.
One experience arc — not a battery of disconnected tasks. About ten minutes, no target.
01 · ConsentInformed consent signed in person after the forty-eight-hour review window.
Session shape: consent → demographic and rowing questions → orientation → open RowSim bout (~10 min) → REQ/UES → interview → debrief.
Open task, about ten minutes
No target, no piece, an explicit invitation to stop. Everything logged is therefore a choice rather than compliance. Thirteen of seventeen rowed without a pause longer than eight seconds. Of the four who paused, the casual marks are brief and scattered; P10’s two longer breaks were self-imposed pieces. Read from the log alone, all four look like disengagement. The interviews decide otherwise.
Open task
Thirteen continuous. Four chose to stop.
Seventeen sessions. A bar grows only while that person is rowing. A pause holds it.
SeventeenBars grow only while someone is rowing. A pause holds that bar; the others keep going.
Seventeen sessions from first stroke to last. A bar grows only while that person is rowing; a pause holds it. Casual pauses are brief and scattered; P10’s two are self-imposed pieces.
The ceiling, then the one wide item
The study followed standard HCI practice: a published engagement scale with established reliability,[089] plus a rowing-experience questionnaire of twenty Likert items, nineteen of which enter the composite. Recommend sits at 4.82; rhythm disruption at the floor. Hassenzahl’s experiential product quality and McCarthy and Wright’s technology-as-experience both warn that a score is not an acquaintance.[056][082] Most items behave. One does not.
“I lost myself in this experience” returns SD 1.44 — the largest of thirty-two items, and the only one whose responses span the whole scale. People asked, while filling the form, whether lost was good. Csikszentmihalyi’s flow treats self-loss as absorption;[033] the item does not say which reading it wants.
Colour marks the response point, not whether it favours the system.
- UESfelt frustrated0.24
- REQdifficulty keeping rhythm0.24
- REQmade rowing more tiring0.33
- REQrequired mental effort0.39
- REQwould recommend0.39
- UESwas absorbed in the activity0.62
- UESlost myself in the experience1.44
The only item whose responses spread across the whole scale.
Instruments
The ceiling, then the one wide item.
Distributions for the items that carry the claim, ordered by standard deviation. Thesis Fig. 5.5.
01 · TightSixteen of seventeen gave the lowest point on rhythm disruption. The display did not get in the way.
Response distributions ordered by standard deviation. Colour is the response point. “Lost myself” is the only item that spans the scale.
Logs, scales, and talk
Background questions come first: demographics and rowing history, before orientation. Then the logs name the cases; REQ and UES locate the ceiling; the interviews say what the cases mean. Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis is the method for the last of those.[019] Gaver, Beaver and Benford’s ambiguity as a resource is why an open mapping was the right thing to put in front of them.[047]
Instruments
The instruments. One synthesis.
Background questions, logs, scales, and interviews are synthesised. Divergence is a finding, not a gap.
01 · StreamsDemographic and rowing-background questions, logs, REQ, adapted UES-SF, and interviews were collected from the same seventeen sessions.
Demographic and rowing-background questions, sensor/PM5 logs, REQ, adapted UES-SF, and interviews converge. Synthesis is done.
Output separates. Engagement does not.
Seven physical-output measures separate elite from casual; none of the six engagement measures do. The identical test, on the identical seventeen people. Non-detection is not equivalence — the elite arm is five — but because the same design separates the groups on one family and not the other, the null on engagement is informative rather than merely underpowered.
Group comparison
Output separates. Engagement does not.
Each bar is −log₁₀ p. The spine is p = .05. Ranked as in the thesis.
01 · ForceSeven physical-output measures cross the line. Ranked as in the thesis, not regrouped.
Ranked Mann–Whitney p-values. Physical output sits left of p = .05; engagement does not.
Trained rowers occupy a different region
Elite sessions sit in a high-work band at or below the casual median rate. Length and force, not frequency. That is the biomechanical signature Smith and Spinks already described; the floor did not erase it, and it did not have to.
Rate and work
Trained rowers occupy a different region.
Seventeen sessions. Stroke rate against work per stroke. No target was given.
01 · CasualTwelve recreational sessions rise first. Rate spreads; work stays low.
Seventeen sessions: stroke rate against work per stroke. Elite band at or below the casual median rate.
What the interviews do that the tables cannot
Three themes support the design, two qualify it, one challenges it. All seventeen described coupling. Two people — a first-time rower and someone with thirty years in the sport — independently said the flow was not theirs because nothing they did could stop it. Talk of novelty decay, or of figuring the mapping out, is not evidence that they exhausted it.
01 / 26Coupling drove engagement
Interview themes
Six themes. Not a transcript wall.
01 · Coupling drove engagementSupportsReal-time mapping
Six interview themes as tour stages. Three support the design, two qualify it, one challenges it.