Kimotion at geekSPARK 2016

Just a few short days months ago, Kimotion was on display at SPARKcon. SPARKcon is a large art festival in Raleigh, and we occupy a small slice of it called geekSPARK.

# Kimotion Levels Up

Last year’s tech had a rudimentary and finicky hand tracking system. It was workable, but a lot of visitors had trouble using it, especially kids. This year, I added Leap Motion support, which was a huge… jump forward for hand tracking.

Adam, of Maniacal Labs, built the fantastic adjustable Leap Motion mounting arm shown above. It allowed visitors of any height to participate comfortably and worked like a dream.

Several new mods were written as well, though Jared’s Fish mod remained the most popular by a large margin!

Another big change was simplifying the mod writing experience for beginners. By removing the project’s build system entirely, the get started instructions are essentially “unzip file, run start.sh”. Browser support for ES6 has come a long way since last year, so I was able to remove Babel and run raw ES6 code in Firefox and Chrome. Beginners are no longer put off by the complex build system. Plus, not having to wait while builds run is a nice bonus.

# Maniacal Labs

We shared the room with Adam and Dan from Maniacal Labs, who brought their awesome LED displays. Adam even wrote a brand new Kimotion client to run on their biggest display, which you can see a clip of in the video at the top of this post.

Our two exhibits fit so well together that we’re considering uniting even further next year.

# Viva la geekSPARK!

Thanks to Truett and Noel for all their organization and support. Thanks to Ian for pulling me into this project two years ago and for climbing into the ceiling to shut off the lights. And thanks to all the Kimotion contributors for building mods and adding color and fun to everyone’s weekend.