When California State University, Bakersfield Computer Science Professor Dr. Nick Toothman was a doctoral student at University of California, Davis, he was part of a team developing a motion-capture game called “Play the Knave,” an educational karaoke-style experience where users perform scenes from Shakespeare plays and their movements are portrayed on a screen by an avatar. It was 2014, and the Microsoft Kinect — with its motion sensor capabilities — was the perfect platform for it.
Over time, “Play the Knave” proved to be a valuable tool in making at-times-difficult literature material more accessible for people of all ages. But a problem well-known to game developers loomed: the Kinect was becoming obsolete, discontinued by its manufacturer with spare parts harder and harder to come by.
To continue bringing the game to classrooms, Dr. Toothman would need to rework the game for a new platform, ideally making a version of the game that would also be more flexible for future technologies too. For this, he enlisted computer science student Jennifer Kuo, and the two spent the fall semester adapting “Play the Knave” for the Oculus Quest virtual reality headset.
In October, their work earned the game Best AR/VR Experience at the Meaningful Play Conference, which brings together experts from the worlds of gaming and education to share ideas and exhibit educational games like “Play the Knave.”
“A huge part of winning that was possible because Jennifer and I spent the time leading up to the conference, mostly in September, playtesting the game, trying to improve the experience of selecting a scene, cutting away any of the options that would just get in the way of trying it out and enjoying the performance of it,” Dr. Toothman said. “We made a lot of progress in a very short amount of time to make that happen.”
Though Kuo didn’t attend the conference, which was held in Michigan during midterms, she learned of the achievement from her mentor soon after they won.
“It does mean something special to know that the work that you’ve been putting in turned out to be something that’s meaningful,” she said.