Week 4 (Feb 2nd- 6th)
This was a busy week for Play4Life. We had our branding review session and the feedback has kept Gina busy with iterating on the marketing design. The programming team has been prototyping different ways to accomplish our paint splatting idea and the design team has been iterating on ways to keep 2-4 year old kids active and engaged in the interaction. We are now firmly in the “toy” space rather than the game space. On Wednesday we were able to get the projector mounted and function as well as the Kinect overhead. Our preliminary tests with tracking have been very promising. Dave has successfully been able to get an object to follow you and paint the ground as you walk on it. We are looking into ways to expand the area that we can track, as currently it is a good bit smaller than the screen size.
We met with faculty member Jesse Schell to get feedback. He felt that we were heading in the right direction, but recommended that we stick with interactions that could be completely independent of one another. This makes sense to us as a team. Our observation of the kids only validates that opinion further. It is nearly impossible to get kids this young to understand they have to accomplish one task in order to complete another. This also allows for kids to interact separately or together. We are going a long way to ensure that this won’t be something that forces kids to play together, but at the same time allows them to if that decide. We found during our first visit to the museum that if you try and force kids to play together they may not share or play nice, and then it disrupts the flow of the rest of the museum.
We also prepared ourselves for our quarters presentation this coming Monday. We have multiple prototypes up and running as well as a healthy design direction, so we are excited to get the faculty feedback.
The Week Ahead
On Monday, we have our quarters walk around with the faculty. Then we can get right to implementing feedback and really getting the design functioning and working. We will also be conducting a retrospective to let us evaluate our process thus far. It will be a good opportunity to see if what we are doing is working. we will need to work on getting the front projector fired up and some art assets going.
Until next week readers,
P4L