Kotaku calls Mother Nature, A Kinect Game Co-Developed at ICT, Possibly the Best of Them All

The video game blog Kotaku recently featured Diane Tucker’s Kincect-based game, Mother Nature, under the headline, The Best Kinect Game You Never Heard of (And Maybe the Best of them All).  The post includes a video demonstration of the game and calls the controls, “smartly elegant”.
Mother Nature was deliberately designed to exploit the positive emotions linked to certain gestures to enhance players’ experience. Project Lead Diane Tucker uncovered the research revealing the interrelationships among movement, emotion and story and developed early levels of the game using OpenNI working at Mark Bolas’s MxR Lab in the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC. The ideas for the game were first generated and pitched as part of the Project Natal development course Microsoft and USC offered in Spring 2010. The prototype developed for that course helped Mother Nature win a spot in USC’s competitive Advanced Game Project, administered collaboratively by the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, through which a student team of designers, artists and engineers – headed by lead engineer Thai Phan—designed and built the game.
Read the post and watch the video
Visit the Mother Nature site