Game Designer at Playpower.org

Playpower.org is a non profit organization based in CMU(Carnegie Mellon University) which supports affordable, effective, fun learning games. We’re starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.

I will be working with the development team of playpower.org under the name playpower.com here in India.
The task is to make flash based games on IPAD and am loving it.

Mark talked a lot about social games and how zynga looks at them. How revenues are gentrated and what are the pitfalls when you are running with social media.

the next two days were hectic in terms of workshop and interaction with fellow developers. The exposure GDC provided to students and young developers to understand the market and the people in business is creditable.

I personally attended may workshops but I would like to mention two of them that really made me think.

The first one was Ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors where Vishal Gondal, CEO, Indiagame shared his life experiences of becoming a gaming entrepreneur and making it big. He explained how confidence, a little bit of stupidity and foresightedness can work you wonders.

The other workshop that I loved was Understanding The magical world of Design! by Hemanth Sharma,Platform Evangelist, Adobe Systems. Hemanth explained the very basics on how we can you basics of visual design in games and enhance the experiences. Actually the presentation made me thing on how we perceive these small visual units and often ignore their importance.

In all a great show, awesome food and openBar at GDC. What else would you want:)

We were introduced to basic interaction/installation design fundamentals and taught some tools like ZoneTrigger.We were trying to understand the interaction in a space where visual stimulus(through motion detection) and possible sound responses.

Using the software the view covered by the webcam appears in computer where you can draw upto six zones where the activity can be detected. Sizes of all these zones are usually independent of each other. In case of any motion being detected, the software plays a predefined sound.

The initial setup was done on a water dispenser where, as soon as the tap is pressed to get water a sound of toilet flush is played.
here is how the setup looked

Here is the video:

Another Idea that we implemented was:

The whole concept was such that a person enters a particular area and there are 6 motion detection zones where his movement leads to several drum beat sounds or dance sounds and as a person starts liking any particular sound, he/she shall repeat his actions which then become the rhythmic body movements which would be very dance like. For the same reason the accurate sound notes could not be found on the web. This inturn happened to be the trigger for me to explore a new software, “Garage Band”. Later the sounds extracted from the software were in a *.m4a format which had to be converted to *.wav format.

So we were doing whole lot of things but still I missing something. None of these seemed to me very interesting as installation.at the same time I was reading Brendan Dawes “Analog in digital out“

There are a set of pages where branden explains how he made a dough of color control the volume of a song.
Actually what he did was take a red colored clay and make a ball out of it . At the same time camera is set to capture the red ball and is tracking the red color. As branden flattens the ball in to a elongated cylinder the tracked color blob increases in size and the width value is mapped to the volume. Interesting!!
It got me all excited, so next morning I started something new.

I started working with color tracking :

After some more brain storming I finally got what I was looking for. Here is what I did

Here is the final video for the concept:

It was great two weeks at NID Bangalore.

Nikhil

So our team of four came up with solution for supporting the UID registration scheme.The UID stands for Unique Identification Number which is an initiative of Unique Identification Authority of India of the Indian government to create a unique ID for every Indian resident.

here is what we proposed:

This is our final video for the concept:

Nikhil

The idea for the installation revolved around using our general knowledge about objects and environment around us to achieve certain tasks in the game.

For the concept my friend did a paper prototype of the entire thing.
The project never took off for some reason but, I still see potential in this project.

Nikhil

OZCHI the annual conference of CHISIG (the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of the HFESA).OZCHI is Australia’s leading forum for finding out about the latest technology and methods concerning human-computer interaction.

And about the challenge:

The OzCHI student design challenge is a 24-hour event that precedes the OzCHI 2011 conference. During the challenge teams from around the world will have 24 hours to come up with a solution to a design brief.

So at six in the morning we got a design brief, that was:

The challenge this year invites you to explore the serendipitous as a theme both in terms of design and design forms:

Explore the serendipitous in your process
Design for serendipitous participant experience
Be aware of and document serendipitous discovery in your process
Use serendipitous experiences for design inspiration

Our team name was “Fresh ideas”

You can read about the design brief here in detail.

Apart of the contest was to maintain a blog to document the research process we followed.This was our blog:http://freshideas-ozchi24.tumblr.com/

Finally when the results came out we didn’t won but got a special mention for our entry here.

This is our entry for the competition and rest the documentation is present on our blog.

A good link to understand what Kinect is and how it works.

I started with trying to get hold of kinect on processing where you have libraries written by Hardink Pandya and daniel shiffman.

Both these libraries didn’t worked for me for some reason.The daniel shiffmans library is for mac and I was using a windows desktop and hardik pandya’s library had some issues on my desktop.

I started looking for other solution and did find some.I must say one of the sites called kinect hacks gives a whole lot of info about kinect and its use for installations.

Most of the kinect hacks work with the set of drivers from prime sense but the libraries and most of the example using these drives do not fetch the skeleton data for kinect.
Using official kinect SDK, it is quite easy to get skeleton data but then for processing and flash I didn’t find any libraries using the SDK.

A workaround I made was getting the skeleton data from C sharp using visual studio and writing it down to a textfile and continuosly reading it from flash or processing.The video tutorial here gives good start in to how to set things up with c sharp.

And this site has a whole lot of kinect tutorials for those who want to work with C.

Back to my project.Surfing through net I found Open Exhibits.The site states Open Exhibits to be:

Open Exhibits is a software development kit (SDK) for Flash that is free for museums, students, nonprofits, and educational use.

One of the tools provided by Open Exhibhits is TUIO Kinect which takes in kinect data and publishes them as TUIO cursor events which could then be read by TUIO as3 Library and can be interpreted as gestures.More info about TUIO as3 and the gestures available can be found here.

I was able to recive the TUIO touch events for flash but the gestures where still not firing for some reason.I kept on looking for the same for more than 3 days.Then I mailed “Gimmix” the person who wrote the TUIO as3 library describing the problem that looked weird to me.
here is what gimmix had to say:

Hi Nikhil,

The gesture events are created by analyzing the incoming tuio tracking data.
Some things you can do to check what may be the problem:
- Do the Debug circles show up?
- Does the dragging work?
- If the dragging works, try to use the other gesture mode hinted in the GestureManagerExample

I guess you use this tracker: http://code.google.com/p/tuiokinect/

I’ll have a look ath the source to see if it implements the complete tuio1.1 spec which is needed for the gestures to properly work.

I really tried hard to figure what was wrong but no success.Finally I got something working.

The way that worked for me with the gestures being recognized was MT Kinect
The site states MT Kinect as:

Enables the development of multitouch applications with the Microsoft Kinect that use gesturing rather than direct touches. This virtual webcam driver outputs an image from a depth range that can be used with any blob tracking software that supports DirectShow (like CCV).

Download MT kinect and follow the steps of installation which include adding a vcam filter and installing CCV (community Core vision).I used CCV1.3 for the project.
In CCV try the next and prev cam button to select the Kinect as desired camera.
Select the TUIO checkbox and thats it!
try sample code for the gigaPixel Viewer.

here is what I did :

last few day I have been reading a little bit about licencing for commercially using Kinect and I am afraid microsoft currently offers only research licences for there official kinect SDK but plans to put up a commercial license soon.

Here are some links that I found worth mentioning:

1.http://kinect.dashhacks.com/kinect-hacks/2011/01/20/mt-kinect-controlling-gigapixel-image-kinect
2.http://kinect.dashhacks.com/mt-kinect
3.http://www.kinecthacks.com/
4.http://hackaday.com/category/kinect-hacks/
5.http://www.andsomeideas.com/labs/kinect/
6.http://spryflash.com/blog/?p=32

Nikhil

I have been in similar position several times where I would post some issue reagarding some of my project and some one from somewhere comes and becomes a lifesaver.

Today I was working on another flash game but this time 3D(this is the first time I am working on a physics based 3D game).Another issue came up and I had no solution and hence my old friend again came in to picture.

I logged on to Actionscript.org and tried to log in to my account so that I can post.I had already forgotten my password so it took me some hit and trials to figure out what my password was.

As soon as my user profile page opened I became nostalgic. On the top right of the screen was mentioned the last date when I looged in to the account and I said “shit it was 17 months back”.Yes the date was 04-03-2010 at 05:30 AM.
Jut before I came to NID.

It was like coming back to a home.

I loved this feeling.The interesting part is my attachment with a site and a webpage.This is how technology has changed the way we see things.
The feeling that should be attached to some tangible object has now evolved to level where it applies itself to some visual data that is stored in binary (0&1) and reside god knows where.

Amazing feeling.