CoronaKids

Interactive game demo - keep 6ft distance!
Start screen in the interactive path
Mask over the face demo - creative part

Inspiration

We were looking for a project that would positively impact those affected by the pandemic that is still ravaging through our communities. We were aiming to help the underrepresented groups in this issue, that we normally don’t tend to think about when talking about covid-19 consequences. We decided that kids aged 6-10 are the perfect group for this project.

What is your project

Our project represents a fun and educational video game for primary school kids to engage with the new realities in the covid-19 world. There are two parts of our game: interactive and creative. Interactive path focuses on teaching kids to keep the social distance while interacting with other kids in the school playground. Creative part focuses on drawing your own mask and then trying it out using Augmented Reality.

How did you build it

We are using Unity for the most of the work, while utilizing Apple’s ARKit and PencilKit for addition in the creative part. We purchased some of the Unity assets from the internet, as well as designing our own where we needed something more specific, like the facemask for the creative part.

Challenges you ran into

First and foremost, the lack of time. Being a small team, with very limited experience with Unity, it was difficult to learn some of the more complex systems that are needed for our project. We also never did a collaborative project, thus we probably spent about 4 hours in total in the terminal, figuring out what are the issues with our git repo, such as merge conflicts. Additionally, lot’s of Apple’s APIs are fairly new and documentation is not the most straightforward, thus making it quite difficult to navigate around with our small team.

What did you learn

Version management with git; ARKit; Deeper understanding of Unity; Facial recognition and facial tracking through unity;

What can you improve

With more time, we will be able to research and study more of the methods we need, and in order to implement the ideas that we had in mind, thus making it a more efficient and overcompassing project. As of now, the two parts (creative and interactive) are split within two unity projects, which we will connect into one as soon as time allows. The creative part needs to allow for editing of the mask, which we have not fully incorporated into the project yet.