Design And Implementation Of An Interactive Fitness Game Based On The Kinect

Somatosensory equipment and technology has been developing rapidly in recent years, meanwhile, the application and development based on somatosensory interaction is currently a popular research area. Especially in game industry, compared with traditional games, being out of the desktop and without controlling equipment, somatosensory interaction brought about strong feeling of reality and control for the players with the similar operation in real space, which greatly enhanced the game’s gameplay and payability.Kinect has been widely used as a mature somatosensory equipment in recent years. Based on the research of Kinect, as well as the analysis of related game design, the paper suggested that the design of the game based on Kinect should fully make use of the depth data captured by Kinect, and the paper also explored the design and implementation of an interactive fitness Kinect game prototype. The design of the prototype took fully advantage of the data, computing and interaction of the Kinect. With a scenery combined real and virtual, the design allowed the players interact directly with game elements without virtual agents in a three-dimensional space. The game prototype took fitness exercise as main content and designed the game elements, such as stories, rules and interfaces, which provided players strong participating and immersive feelings and lead to a nice experience.The interface and scenery of the prototype was made by Unity3D game engine. The author made a comparative analysis of several Kinect connectors, and then used Microsoft Kinect SDK to connect hardware and software for data communication, which also helped to achieve the integration of CMU Kinect Wrapper and Unity3D. The prototype also used Unity3D to do the Kinect data processing, and took FBX file format as data exchanging format between3dsMax and Unity3D files. The prototype accomplished the corresponding game AI programs and special shaders (Shader) code to render the scene. The paper took the improvement of gameplay as a starting point, mainly discussed how to combine the characteristics of technology with the interaction design and explained the design principles used in the prototype design. The paper finally summarized the process, methodology and outcome of the user test.The paper not only had a certain reference value for the development and design of somatosensory game, but also provided methods for virtual display and media art installations. The idea about the balance of technology and design also provided a useful point for applications of new technology.