This is a group project me and some friends did as a station for an exhibition at a experience center called Universeum. It is designed for younger kids and while it is an actual game it i more centered around the ideas of exploration and playing. A pile of virtual leaves are projected onto the ground. Players can kick the leaves around physically by moving above the projection surface. Under the leaves there are hidden tokens. Players try to find all these in as little time as possible, though the game is really just a continues cycle of an interactive surface. When no one have played with it for a while foot steps will appear on the ground, showing bystanders how to play the game.

Maintenance and Use

By now Leaf-a-Way has been in the wild of Universeum’s popular exhibition hall for about a month. Naturally there are issues, although the installation seems to be holding together somewhat. From what we can understand, from Universeum´s explanation and our tests, there is a memory leak in the Kinect library. Not entirely easy to fix as we haven’t written it and given that this has just been a half-term school project. Nevertheless, we have concocted a fix where the app will restart whenever the frame rate goes too low.

Except for installing the update, we also had the pleasure to see the installation in use, good times!

Grand Opening

Now the exhibition is officially open and we’ve had our share of fruit salad and cocktails. Looking forward to see how the thing will do after a while of extreme kid exposure, one of the toughest environment for interactive installations. :P

Installation Complete

Leaf-a-Way is now installed at Universeum and we are looking forward to see how it will faire live. Hopefully it won’t break too badly. Great work by everyone in the team, it’s been super cool working with you!

User Testing

We are getting closer to the deadline when we will install Leaf-a-Way at the experience center Universeum. One of our team members recruited a friend’s kids to do some user testing ahead of installation. We were satisfied to see that the game seem to, as least for some kids, function as intended by design. The platform supports formal competition, but it also possible to user for informal, multi-user play.

Project Course for Universeum

Me and some fellow students at the interaction design master at Chalmers have joined a custom project course. During it we will be collaborating with Universeum, a local experience center here in Gothenburg, and create an interactive installation for their upcoming exhibition.

At this stage in the design process we have visited the center in order to study how their current interactive installations function and what their users do. We filmed an installation which we wanted to use as a base case and inspiration for our design. The outcome is that we will likely focus on the promotion of both informal and formal unsupervised play.