Description: Let’s Play Legos is a tangible collaborative play tool which allows remote players to craft a story and share a playspace using legos.  Using a Kinect and the Relief system, a player’s lego block form and actions are recreated in a remote location allowing the players to collaborative build a structure.  Gestural and audio commands allow the players to also collaboratively construct a sound and landscape.

The system is designed to allow two remote players to share a physical play space.  The players can collaboratively build and modify an architectural structure using legos.  When one player places a block, the kinect senses the change in position and raises the other players board accordingly.  Using the same base structure, players then can collaboratively create a story using audio commands and gestures to change a displayed background as well as trigger sound effects.  The sound effects are located in the play space through the use of gestures to heighten the “telepresence” effect.  The remote player’s hands and character pieces are projected onto the the play space from above.

The following schematics show the main metaphor used in this system as well as the way it is implemented.  The remote player is projected onto a “window” through which they can reach and affect change within the shared play space.  This is acheived using two kinects, actuated tables and projectors.

The following videos are an imagined user interaction video highlighting the different interactions between the remote players, and a video of the prototype showing the response of the actuated table to changes in a block structure.

User Interaction Video

Actuated table prototype video

For more information please look at the Let’s Play Legos slides.

Contributions:  Woong Ki Sung and Zachary Barryte produced the prototype, Eric Jones, Jesse Austin-Breneman and Trygve Wastevedt produced the user interaction video.