ABSTRACT
Most families in developed countries are turning into ‘nuclear family’ where the elderly does not live together with young generation. The contact between the elderly and their family members are significantly reduced. For older adults to maintain contact or connected with their family members, audio and video based long-distance interactions like phone, Face Time, Skype, etc. are commonly employed. Recent emergence of the Kinect device (https://www.xbox.com/Xbox360) provides a low-cost and convenient full-body motion capture opportunity. Kinect enables innovative long-distance interaction by letting people at distant places drive their avatars to interact with each other in a 3D virtual world. This paper leverages the Kinect-based long-distance interaction techniques to develop a multi-player game to enhance ‘connection’ between older adults and their beloved young kids. The older adults and their young kids play before Kinect videos. The two game scenes are synchronized through Internet so that both sides see the same game scene. The game scene contains two avatars that are manipulated by the elderly and their lovely kids through two Kinect devices. A posture frame based game playing strategy is developed to force ‘body touch’ of the avatars in the game scene. The players have to manipulate theirs avatars to avoid colliding with the posture frame while at the same time trying to touch the ‘hot points’ of the other person’s avatar. 192The ‘body touch’ will warm the older adult’s heart. An evaluation experiment is planned to examine the feeling of the elderly at different game playing strategies.
