GFHJ2012: Public Space Invaders

During the 2012 Games for Health Jam, the theme was ‘playing games in public spaces’ with the goal of adding some extra life to areas like plazas, transit stations, waiting halls, pedestrian tunnels, and other public areas.

Another consideration was the health aspect involved in the Games for Health Jam. The game should stimulate people to get off their butts and start exercising, to reduce and prevent obesity. (Though many studies have shown that exercise is a very poor strategy for losing weight. Simply eating less energy than your body needs works much better. Of course exercise is still useful if you simply want to improve physical fitness of the body.)

We set out to make a game prototype called ‘Public Space Invaders’. This game would invade public spaces. Get it? Get it?

So we made it resemble the age old classic space invaders, though the gameplay is very different, and adjusted to the constraints of our input device..

Which was a camera, mounted along the top of a wall, aimed down onto the physical play field. Movements of people in this field are translated to objects in the game, so people can play the game by moving and jumping and jostling around the playing field.

The camera as input device proved very sensitive to all kinds of environmental interference, like the color and texture of the floor, the color of players’ clothes, and most frustratingly of all, sunlight shining through the windows of the building and changing every minute.

We would have liked to use a Kinect (several were available at the jam site) but the Kinect didn’t have quite enough detection range for our purpose. So we had to result to a simple webcam and used blob detection on the video feed to detect players.

We showed off the game at the Games For Health Europe and Game In The City conferences.