ADVENTURE AWAITS YOU

Adventure Multimedia Museums specializes in designing and creating museum exhibitions, tourist routes, theme parks, and science centers. They also care about maintaining a balance between multimedia innovations, classic exhibition solutions, artistry, and utilitarianism as well as the educational and entertainment character of a given undertaking.

Client

Adventure Multimedia Museums

Sector

Museums

Public Institutions

Services

Gesture tracking

3D modeling

Technology

Microsoft Kinect

Unity

Visual results video

Business value

The Sky’s the limit

An interactive stand is a fun and engaging way of transferring knowledge – with a little help of our own senses and muscles – directly into the visitors’ heads. Being able to experience things on our own skin helps us better understand the world. This includes understanding the laws of nature – from the simplest to the most complex concepts.

Here, for example, children can learn how much work is done by a little bird to remain in the sky. This is a great introduction to lessons about the importance of taking care of wild animals (i.e. feeding, not abusing them).

Challenge

A bird’s eye view

Our client asked us to help them with their newest project: a movement-based (Kinect) app, which was supposed to engage the little visitors of the Wrocław museum. It was important to stick to the Museum’s mission, challenging the way people think about the natural world: including its past, present, and future.

As we all know, there is no better way to make kids interested than to introduce them to a tremendously exciting combination of games and the newest technology.

Process and project scope

Scope

The main purpose of the Kinect bird game was to fly with your ‘virtual’ wings by performing real-time movements. The whole experience uses a third-person perspective. The bird outline was partly transparent – in order to not distract the player. The bird could fall from the sky at any time, making kids aware of the number of movements needed for flying.

Process

To enter the gaming mode, the user must stand about 1.5–2 m from the front of the Kinect sensor (display), controls are gesture-based functions, letting kids navigate with their own arms (i.e. swipe for choosing the language, T-body position for a new game).

Service

To improve the experience, we’ve added an animation of proper flapping movement in the bottom left corner of the screen. This was crucial for the game mechanics: the bird was constantly losing altitude and every correctly performed gesture made the bird rise slightly upwards.

Abandoning the gesture or performing it incorrectly led to the bird descending to an unacceptable attitude and as a result of the interruption of the game. There was also an option for choosing another bird (with a different pattern of flying).

Technology stack

Aim high

Kinect Birds was developed with the Unity engine. It targets stationary devices operating on Microsoft Windows, using Microsoft Kinect 2.0 to recognize gestures.

The UI was made in Adobe After Effects, and the graphics assets were refined in Blender.

Unity - the main tool used by 4Experience