Interactive Basketball Simulation a Slam Dunk at Science Museum

The Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology in Syracuse, NY (better known as the MOST) had retained exhibit producer Geograph Industries to design an interactive children’s activity for a science exhibit on musculature. Cincinnati-based design firm Jack Rouse & Assoc. then recommended GestureTek’s (Sunnyvale, CA) GestureXtreme Virtual Reality Game System to Geograph.

GestureTek’s touch-free, interactive entertainment and game systems are controlled by hand and body gestures instead of touchscreens, remote controls, keyboards or joysticks. So, Geograph retained GestureTek to provide video gesture-control technology and interactive graphic content for this new museum-display project.

Geograph chose the GestureXtreme interactive-game package with a high-end computer, camera technology and gesture-recognition software included. GestureTek’s out-of-the-box basketball-simulation application was customized to reflect the museum’s colors in players’ uniforms and skin tones, and the background graphics. The museum’s logo was also integrated into the visual imagery.

“Being in the business of large-screen displays for tradeshows, exhibits, museums and digital signage, we are well aware of how gesture control is revolutionizing this business,” said Rich Schmidt, a manager at Geograph. “We often leverage new technologies from companies like GestureTek to stay on the leading edge.”

With the GestureXtreme immersive basketball simulation, children play basketball live onscreen against a computer-generated player. A camera captures the child’s movements and instantaneously translates those movements to the child’s identical onscreen video image, where the child can watch themselves in real-time as they play on the digital basketball court. The program is similar to Wii, but it allows the child to see his/her actual image rather than a cartoon character, and there’s no need to hold a remote-control device.

Peter Plumley, the MOST’s project director, said, “Children find it entertaining, as well as empowering, to be able to control the onscreen actions of their video image. More importantly, it helps give them a better sense of how their muscular and skeletal systems work and the nature of kinematics (how the body moves).”

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