You Are The Outfielder was an interactive game installation for the Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American Exhibition at the National Museum of American Jewish History. The goal was to create an immersive and fun experience that would appeal to all ages and provide a bit of a break in a very heady exhibit. 

Challenges

We really wanted to maximize physical engagement of players, but were challenged to find a way to detect the both the players' location and hand motion. Research revealed that someone had written a plug-in to allow the use of Microsoft's Xbox Kinect Motion sensors with the Unity Game Engine. However we were set back by the fact that the sensors we purchased had been upgraded and were no longer compatible with the plug-in. After hunting around for an older version of the device, we were able to proceed.

Once I worked out reliably tracking the player's position, the final challenge was isolating a single arm motion. Players could "cheat" by waving both arms in the air instead of using only the gloved hand. Also if they switched arms mid game, this would confuse the software a bit. To solve this, I wrote calibration interface that occurs at the start of each player's experience, where they chose which hand they wish to use. The glove was assigned to that hand and the other arm could be ignored.