Kinaptic

The master project Kinaptic is developing a video game for blind and sighted people using the Microsoft Kinect, haptic feedback devices and stereo rendering for different 3D devices.

A multimodal gaming approach for blind and sighted players.

The motivation of the project is to explore how blind and sighted players can be included in a shared virtual environment. This will be approached through the development of a game in which the sighted player forms a tunnel with his body by movements in front of the Kinect while the blind player flies through this tunnel with an object that provides haptic feedback. To win the game the blind player has to reach his sighted opponent who is trying to form the tunnel in a way that makes it difficult to reach him.

The Official launch of the project was on the 6th of october and currently a team of 10 computer science graduate students is working on the project goals on a daily basis. Besides creating an awesome video game the goal of our team is to evaluate the outcomes of our project in a user study and to publish a scientific paper.

Sculpting

Next to the main project we developed a side project called Sculpting. It is about designing objects or sculptures in a virtual three-dimensional environment with the use of virtual sculpting tools. The outcome of the project is a prototype of a sculpting game.

Our approach is based on the zSpace, a 3D virtual reality tablet. The zSpace system comes with a high definition stereoscopic display which renders full resolution images. In addition it enables the user to experience smooth parallax by tracking the movements of the users' head. To interact with the virtual environment the zSpace offers a Stylus which is designed with 6 degrees of freedom. The Stylus is tracked by the system and used to design 3D objects. For head tracking and quad buffer stereo lightweight glasses are used. Overall the zSpace is can be seen as a virtual sculpting tool. Like the main project the goal for this game is also an inclusion game for blind and sighted people. This makes it necessary to think about non-visual tools as well. Therefor we decided to use a haptic device (PHANTOM Omni) as well.

More information about the technical side of the project please follow this link or visit the section Sculpting.