It's been hard to keep in touch with friends during the pandemic. A friend of mine recently hosted a Netflix party so several of us could hang out. During the party, I realized that watching a movie takes a long time and it's hard to interact while watching it. I remembered we used to play simple games to interact with each other and this is missing in online video chats. The video interaction is great thanks to the internet speeds, but expressing yourself physically is definitely missing.
The small interactions with your hands and body adds an additional dimension to your personality. I thought about how can I improve current video interactions. A couple of things I noticed were (1) missing serendipitous activities and (2) expressing yourself with gestures. I focused on these 2 issues to improve our presence in video conversations.
I think one of the best ways to build serendipitous interactions is to have an activity like playing games with someone. You get to know the person in more detail. However you don't want the game to be too complex or take too long, because then the game becomes the main element of the interaction. I believe games like Charades, Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke or even Sorry allow you to show your personality.
Even if you're not good at these games, you still enjoy playing them. Socializing in a group is what makes them special. So, I searched for how I can bring human interactions to video chat and I realized the best way is to allow people interact with games using hand gestures, voice commands or facial gestures.
I started building a web app with a camera room where 2-4 people can have a video conversation and then added hand tracking to play games with hand gestures. Once the technical building blocks were ready, I thought about which game to play initially. At first I built the once popular Snake game where the snake grows with the collected apples and you move the snake around by holding your hand at an angle and reflect it. I played the game with a couple of people and found it quite complex to play using hands, so in order to simplify I landed on the Ping Pong game. This actually made sense since the first known digital game built is also the Pong game.
Ping Pong is a tennis like game that you can control paddles moving your hand up and down. Since the paddles move only in 1-dimension it was easy to play with someone and have a nice video conversation at the same time. Oz Hashimoto from Zypsy designed an amazing landing page and game room with game artifacts. He also created game audio files from scratch which made the game much more interactive.
After finishing the game site, I played it with a handful of people from friends to family and fixed some of the small issues and then published it on Product Hunt. Some people commented saying this is a very creative project and were wondering what other games were in the pipeline. While building the ping pong game, I realized the game is not exactly as interactive as it can be and I think it's because the game is originally built to be played with a joystick. Nevertheless, it was more fun to play a game with someone than just talking, so now I'm adding more games that are purely gesture based.
From the feedback I got, I realized this project has good potential to be used for casual video chat hangouts. So for the future I will be adding more games to the platform where the games are more engaging and use mainly hand gestures. There are many games that fit into this category and I think this is the right direction for the product.
I see this project as a platform where many games and interactive applications can be built on top of it. I'm also going to improve the gaming logic to be more modular in the platform, so that I can add more games easily.
Realizing that we need a more interactive video chat application where you can also do activities gave me the insight to build Camera Games where you can play games with a friend using hand gestures. I belive this new way of interactivity will bring us closer even online and make us build stronger relationships.