Evolution!!! By Mikhail & Nikhil Acknowledgements to Max The Kokusai Warrior for the XNA Game Engine, Rhemyst and Rymix for the Kinect DTW Gesture Recognizer Starter code, Michael Noonan for the Input Simulator API & George Mamaladze for the Global Mouse Key Hook.NET. API

Game Rules Players aim to reach the top of the evolutionary chain Players evolve by efficiently using fighting joints Depending on what you evolve into you get new or enhanced abilities

Game Design Fusion of Live Action with Computer Games 2-D Fighter Combat Game with Kinect Player has to exert themselves in the real world to move characters on screen To simulate a dynamic evolution using fighting techniques Survival of the Fittest !!

Game Technology Use of Kinect for Detection of Player moves Gestures can be recorded for context-sensitive usage (a snake does not punch) Individual joints can be selected for a gesture Two players can be monitored simultaneously Gestures are mapped to appropriate actions on screen

Kinect Gesture Recognition Algorithm Dynamic Time Warping Used for comparing sequences of differing lengths (positional data over time) Uses dynamic programming to match up as many sub-sequences as possible Outputs the “cost” of this matching as a score Thresholded to detect gestures

Game Engine XNA Fighter Engine – by Max The Kokusai Warrior, Trieste - Italy. Runs as an extension of the FlatRedBall Engine in XNA Contains Tools for building Characters and Stages Comes bundled with one stage and one character Complex implementation

Integration Kinect recognizes user gesture from library of prerecorded gestures Triggers a simulated keypress/keydown/keyup Major Problem: XNA unfortunately cannot receive these simulated events Eventual Solution: Add a Windows API Hook for keyboard events in XNA Fighter Engine to echo simulated events inside context of Game

How Evolution Works Keep track of all moves Frequency of different types of moves (eg. Kicks and Punches vs Blocks) or Backing away/Moving forward are tracked These dimensions are analyzed for characteristics like defensive behavior, aggression, etc.

Demo Time !! Bless us this day Oh Lord of Project Demos Keeping fingers crossed highly recommended

Challenges Kinect susceptibility to joint occlusions XNA incompatibility with simulated Input events Complex and buggy Game Engine Lack of (character) art / animation

Future Work More characters (Actual animals this time) More stages More moves Porting to another, simpler engine

Acknowledgements Thank you Max for the game engine – Thank you Rhemyst and Rymix for the starting code on Kinect DTW Gesture Recognizer – Thank you Michael Noonan for the Input Simulator API – Thank you George Mamaladze for the Global and Application Keyboard and Mouse Hooker.NET API –

Thank You! Questions?