Open House Demo

For the open house version of the game we had some issues with the tracking of the kinect and we had to fix these to make the experience smoother. Maxime worked continually with tweaking and improving the interaction so that when it was time for the open house, the interaction was running very smoothly. We didn’t have time to implement seasonal changes in the environment, so we were forced to drop that feature. Initially we had planned to have a transition between seasons, with a clear summer, windy and rainy autumn, snowy winter, and rejuvenating spring. We had the animations for the leaves blowing in the wind, the rain, the snow and we had planned to change the alpha of the leaves to make them appear and disappear during the different seasons along with changing the height variable of the grass so that it diminished during the colder seasons and grew back during the hotter seasons. But unfortunately we ran out of time.

As for the open house demo, we set up the demo on the big screen and the people who tried it seemed to thoroughly enjoy it. For some reason the kinect had trouble detecting Mario. Later after some consideration and observing all the different people who were trying the demo, we suspected that this was probably due to two reasons. First off, it was a busy space and a lot of people were walking past the field of view of the kinect and standing near it so that it picked them up on its sensor. Most other projects who used the kinect had some sort of curtain or had closed off the area, which we had not. This seemed to confuse the kinect so that it, in some cases, lost tracking of the user. Another aspect that we discussed was the height of the users, the placement of the kinect and its field of view which were other plausible reasons for the irregular tracking of the kinect.