Client:

NASA - Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, AL and Kennedy Space Center, FL

Project Details:

NASA's OSAC office in Huntsville, Alabama came to our team relying on us to come up with an attraction that would draw large numbers of trade show attendees to their booth. The project was to be very engaging and also tell the Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis story from the launch pad to flight. 

Our team proposed and developed a new Unity based interactive "game", all self-contained, that used the Kinect system. This enabled participant's movements to build and launch the SLS rocket. We worked with a company that specialized in building all-in-one systems that included the Kinect and a touch screen. The beauty of this was not only could NASA use this for this experience, but also use the touch screen functionality for any future projects that relied on touch based interaction.

For this project, I was over the creative, animation and development team and provided project management and all design work. 

I worked with our team to completely design and storyboard the entire experience before starting production and development. The game was built in a way where it had an intro/screen saver and would start by a user waving to activate the game play. The game was made up of three sections which focused on building the rocket stages, powering the RS-25 rockets for launch and flying the SLS through a ring flight course. In between each stage were complete animation segments produced by our team. The user was given three attempts per stage and had a time limit to complete. All of this functionality could be adjusted by the NASA team at the trade show if needed. Music, sound and voice over was also added.

Seeing that this project was based off movement, we had to work on our development to make sure anyone who came to the Kinect would be able to use it. This could be affected by height, distance from the Kinect sensor and different types of movement. In order make sure anyone could use the device, we constantly tested the software and brought in test volunteers to make sure we had our adjustments correct. We also worked with different movements to assure a user could achieve optimal success and also did not have any discomfort when playing. The device could also be modified by the NASA staff to adjust for any unforeseen issues.

The Kennedy Space Flight Center's EGS program liked it so much that they had us create a new experience for them that gave more emphasis to the preflight prep. This included: stacking the SLS rocket parts; driving the crawler with the SLS to the launch pad; and participating at mission control. 

Click to see Interactive video reel

Roles:

Creative Director, Designer

Tasks:

• Creative leadership, design and brand execution.

• Managed team of animators and interactive/Kinect developers.

• Managed budget and timeline.

• Led team on concept development and storyboarding.