Last time we talked about this project, Sydney was studying the current state of Kinect games and we had a basic working framework which recognized gestures like Waving, Flying and Jumping Jacks. Through the lab’s research in the past, we have found that using our own low-fidelity prototypes as design probes are successful techniques for eliciting design concepts. This is particularly important when kids are involved as its difficult for them to imagine technology that they’re not familiar with, while remaining in context. As we’re preparing for user studies, we have incorporated game elements like score and levels into our prototype. Additionally, we have greatly changed the user interface so that its more appealing to kids. You can get a glimpse of the new interface here.

I’m a Masters student at UF majoring in Computer Science. Microsoft Kinect is an interesting piece of hardware that allows coders to build amazing applications without having knowledge of computer vision or image processing. This project constantly reminds me of what technology is capable of achieving, and I feel happy about working towards making kids’ lives healthier.