One of my two projects for the 2012 ITP Winter Show. (The other was The Buddhist).

The Dragon is a flight simulator in which your body acts as the controller. It’s a Unity game which uses the Kinect and the ZigFu library as a bridge. The game reads the body position of the player and translates this into animation for the dragon avatar and the avatar’s vector through virtual space. I also built a custom breath controller — when the player blows into it, the Dragon breathes fire. The game was very popular with children and adults alike.

The Dragon was my final project for Phoenix Perry‘s Embodied Play class. She featured it in this article for Interactions, the magazine of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

UPDATE May 2014… I recently learned that the New York Museum of Natural History commissioned a very similar experience for their Pterosaur Exhibition. I state for the record that I was first!