Project 3 – Huaishu Peng & Charles Doomany
Neurospasta
a Kinect based 2-player interaction game
CONCEPT
For our main concept we will be developing an experimental game in which two players have the ability to manipulate their own avatar as well as the other player’s avatar. The players will have the choice to interact, fight with their avatar against one another, or just simply explore different ways of manipulating the appearance and/or ability of their avatar.
The player’s avatar will consist of a rag-doll/skeletal model which will mimic the actions of the player via kinect video/depth capture.
The graphic interface will provide a menu for selecting a specific body part and a manipulation function menu for changing certain characteristics or abilities of the selected part.
THE GAME
After trying really hard for a week, we implemented Neurospasta (Greek word usually translated as “puppets”, which means “string-pulling”, from nervus, meaning either sinew, tendon, muscle, string, or wire, and span, to pull), a game without any defined objective or goal, but rather a platform for experimentation and play.
Neurospasta is am interactive two-player game in which the player’s physical movements are mapped to a 2D avatar. The game’s graphic interface consists of a set of manipulation functions which enable players to interact with their avatar as well as the other player’s.
In terms of software, we used Open NI for the skeletal tracking and OpenFrameworks for the UI and texture mapping.
FUTURE PLAN
*For future consideration, Neurospasta would include a larger selection of manipulation functions and in an ideal environment would be able to capture and generate avatar textures for accommodating new player identities.
Hi Charles, Huaishu — nice work! Please document your project here. Below are the group’s comments from today’s Etherpads.
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The messed up aesthetic kind of makes you look like puppets, which is cool. I really wish tha the controls on the right were aligned to the right edge.
It could have been nicer if you had taken different images for different orientations of body parts.
For a demo video make sure that you start off with the characters matching. It is kind of confusing when you start off with each other’s bodies.
The frantic movement of the body parts makes for a very entertaining visual. Also I agree, the button graphics are really nice!
cool concept…there should be a class of projects showing kinect puppets on the blog. placement of icons needs to be improved (push icons to edge of screen).
Very cool concept, but like you said, it’s a bit buggy. But the it’s humorous and interesting in its own way.
The simpleness of the graphcs work well. You have a good idea in the interaction. I really like it when the bits and pieces of it work. Nice job, I cant wait to see it in a little bit once you have iterated on it for a while.
I agree with Golan – the crazy random body parts at the beginning look more like a mistake. I think it’d be cool if you started with piles of body parts at the bottom of the screen. I also liked how you offered functionality like repulsion and scale. It’d be cool if the buttons could be activated by gestures though. You could probably detect “punching” the other persons head or something to do repulsion.
The jumbleness works well. The only one part that’s a little bit distrcting is the lack of neck or space between shoulders+neck. It makes you look… scrunchy.
Agreeing with the suggestions of the icons: make them look more like buttons and give activation feedback. Also, place them at the edges. More UI-y basically.
Screwing around with someone else’s skeleton is gold. Nice one.
Great project idea. Obviously there is still some bugginess, but I liked when the motions worked correctly.
This is HILARIOUS. I like how you chose to present it. The buttons on the right should be all the way to the right. But overall, pretty cool!
Charmingly bizarre. Definitely buggy.
True, a little buggy, but really entertaining. Might suggest to add basic feedback to the interface to make it more obvious when interacting.
Instead of the ‘slot machine’ loading screen, but maybe have the puppet pieces remain static/grayscale. Then give them life when the skeleton is activated.
A little buggy and it’d be nice if the parts aligned better, but really awesome concept none the less.
Really funny. Cool how people are constructed from their skeletons.
agreed with golan’s comment about the loading screen.
nice design sketch, a bit jittery, needs some smoothing and some refinement, the flying parts at the beginning look like there is a problem with the program
your thighs are escaping
I like the interaction, very cool you have a number of gestures that it recognizes. Super fun concept!
Strong work. The concept of having OPERATIONS that one can perform on your opponent’s body is really unique — that’s an important new contribution. I love the funny buttons (e.g. swap body part).