Final Project: Edutain

Concept

This project is intended to help young children learn basic compulsory knowledge such as the alphabet, numbers, colors, and certain objects, quickly in a fun way. This interactive multimedia educational installation is constructed of Unity project, Kinect device, and a projector. Unity is utilized to program and execute interactivity and graphics element, Kinect as the motion sensing device, and a projector to project the visual on to a vertical flat surface. These enable participants to engage with the installation through four choices of different types of games within; mathematical equation games, identify objects and arrange the alphabet of the object’s name, identify colors and collecting the items with the same color, matching animals card with memory games.

Project Evaluation

Limitations
Design Limitations

In the color game, type of item is limited to 5 items per color. However, I did not manage to code all of the items in, thus resulting in 5 items for the color red, and only 2 items for the rest of the colors.

The animation in this game feels a bit flat. Also, the audio could have been implied for the game such as in the color game to mention the color and saying animal’s name when matching the animals.

User Testing Results

Installation setup for user testing

Some of the user testing participants

Observation Results

Installation setup for observation

Observation participants

Interaction Considerations

First installation mockup

Final installation mockup after the finalized idea

Processing to Unity

The initial idea for this project was to make an interactive educational game with physical balls as the game control to triggers a digital reaction. This idea bridges the gap between real physical and virtual world. The mechanism was for the player to throw the physical balls “into” a virtual scene projected on a wall. The technologies that have been used were Microsoft Kinect for Windows v2 and InFocus X6 projector. The front-end design was created using Adobe Illustrator, in which would be programmed using Processing.

Unity

Unity becomes one of the most popular and used by game developers as it provides a very reliable engine for both 2D and 3D cross-platform game development. You can export games for PC, Mac, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, PS3, XBOX with ease. It supports 3 programming languages: C#, UnityScript, and Boo. Although UnityScript sounds like it is the main language, the widely adopted language is C# (Wilcox, 2014).

Processing

Processing is a simplified open source programming language which is suitable for interactive graphics programming. Processing is more focused on the graphic and interaction rather than data structure (Wardana, 2015). It is free to download for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It comes with excellent documentation and a large library of extensions, examples, and demos.

Inspirations

The following figure is compilation or mood board of visual illustrations created by children oriented illustrators that inspire the visual aspect of this project. These illustrations are consistently applying bright color to its vector graphics. Some applying subtle textures to enhance the illustrations. This was shown in previous presentations for the college.