The interactive floor platform is a platform developed at Springlab to apply embodied learning for children of ages 2-4.
In February 2017 I started my bachelor thesis1 research at Springlab. The interactive floor project was in its earliest stages; market research was being conducted but there wasn’t a proof of concept yet. My goal was to find a suitable method of tracking players in a 3D space from a top down position which could be used to build a prototype with.
I started out by exploring the OpenCV Computer Vision library in C++. I built some examples around colour based detection in C++ (p21-29 in my thesis1). While the results were promising, colour tracking wasn’t feasible for the interactive floor since we didn’t want players to wear specific marker based items and such. I did end up completing my thesis using colour detection because I wanted to spent time on porting the C++ to Unity and to explore some tracking algorithms. The end result of my thesis was contour detection of individual items on a colour filtered binary image working in Unity.
After completing my bachelor I started building a prototype interactive floor for Springlab. I had access to a Microsoft Kinect camera and an OpenCV for Unity plugin. I mainly worked together with an interaction designer who took care of setting up a prototype hardware box and designing the interactions.
The prototype can be seen in action in the video below.
Below is a picture of our prototype. To minimize shadows on the play area, we experimented with multiple beamers. Unfortunately, aligning the multiple beamers proved to be impractical.
We tested this prototype with the interactive games on multiple occasions at daycare(s) which proved successful. With the help of this prototype the interactive floor project gained momentum. I started a full time job as a game developer together with one other developer who would take care of the tracking department. I started the project working on the tracking code, but since I am more interested in gameplay programming I transitioned onto game development. I laid the foundations for the setup of the entire application that is still running at more than 100 locations today; I also setup and manage the GitHub version control with pull requests, code reviews, logical commits and the like.