Slay the Runway
Team Size: 4 (Zheng 'Simon' Diao, Xuefan Zhou, Qianye 'Renee' Mei)
Duration: 1 week
Platform: Microsoft Kinect
Slay the Runway was an Extended Reality [XR] experience built for the Microsoft Kinect platform. The experience was designed and built in a one-week rapid prototype and iteration process for the Building Virtual Worlds course at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.
As the appointed leader for a team of four, I provided the overall vision for an experience utilizing the Microsoft Kinetic platform. Rhythm-based movement games have been designed before, but I imagined an experience where participants would pose down the runway in time with catchy music at 120 bpm.
A major challenge the team had was to overcome how to give the guest clues as to what pose they had to perform next. In addition to giving them a chance to practice the poses "behind the curtain" / backstage (where no scoring would occur), we gave them cue cards in the corner of the screen. We captured their real-time image with an overlay of the next pose, so they could be as accurate as possible. We also gave a subtle hint of what was coming up by having the "model" in front of them perform the next pose they would be asked to do.
In addition to maintaining the artistic vision, I developed the audio assets for the experience. To give some variance from existing rhythm based movement games, we hid surprises throughout the experience. This included generating a flurry of bananas when the guest performed a "monkey" pose and a surprise freestyle moment at the end which would also capture images of the guest.
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