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 3D 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.

I have plans to expand this Alpha build into a full-fledged game. Imagine two players dueling one another…