The Name of the Game is Flex

What is this diddly?

Tamara Levy, a recent graduate at University of Pennsylvania, completed her senior project a few weeks ago. Flex, in short, is a virtual game using a full bodied controller.

Hole in the Wall

Flex is modeled after “Hole in the Wall“. If you are not familiar with “Hole in the Wall”, it’s a TV game show where a wall with a funny shaped hole approaches the contestant, and the contestant has to shape their body to fit through that hole.

Motion-What?

Flex, the game, uses a virtual wall and a virtual contestant. However, the person playing the game is actually hooked up to a complex motion capture system, which maps the person’s moves to the computer. It’s the same kind of technology they use in movies to model the movements of 3D characters using human actors.

More than just an experiment

Sounds like fun, but is it really fun? Yes, and this is mainly because in the end Flex did not end up as a half-baked idea in a drawer, it became a fully fleshed game. There are no holes – only in the walls! The game menu gives several options. In Continuous mode you can play the game as long as you want; it doesn’t matter if you crash against a wall one or 30 times, but it does keep score. Survivor mode gives you only three lives, the fourth time you crash is Game Over. There is also an added feature for both game modes with a bonus wall: instead of having a hole in the wall, you get a solid wall with one green square, and if you are able to hit the green square you get extra points. Plus, you can kick around the fallen blocks to vent out your frustration. And yes, all the scores are saved and can be viewed.

Videos!

Head over to Tammy’s blogposts to look at videos from the project.

The Future

To actually make this game marketable, it needs to get rid of the expensive motion capture system and implement a controller that is easy to use and simple to set up at home. There are two parts to accomplishing this.

On the software side, there needs to be a reduced marker set for the player. That is, instead of having 32, or even 16, reflector points, the logic needs to be there to detect the position of a player using 10 or less markers. Obviously, the less markers a person has to put on, the easier it is to set up for the person at home, but it is also easier to end up with ambiguous positions for the player. Think about putting a marker on your wrist, and another on your shoulder – without changing the position of these two, your elbow could be both up or down.

On the hardware side, a regular person cannot afford to set up 16 expensive cameras around the ceiling of their room (and it’s also impractical). The original inspiration for this project was to use Johnny Lee’s project of using a few Wii-motes and some inexpensive LED lights as reflectors to track head position. Taken further, one could use this technology to track the entire body position, thus resulting in a full body controller. This solution is not only cheap to build and easy to set up at home, it is actually quite viable.

Where can I find out more about this?

Project blog is here: http://tlevy-seniordesign.blogspot.com

Tags: gameification, hole in the wall, motion capture, wacky wednesday

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