I knew I wanted to make a video game, but what kind should I try to make? This was my million-dollar question I tried to solve time and time again.

Suddenly, it clicked! All because of these three things:

• My Internship
• My PI’s Research Project
• My Hobby – Playing the Violin

Internship

For the robotics project I was on, I was assigned to work on OpenCV, a Computer Vision python package. To get my hands dirty with this, I tinkered around with the MediaPipe framework – essentially this maps different joints and ligaments on a person’s hand while they move and outputs the camera screen on a computer.

What I got out of this: I wanted my game to track a person’s movement in real-time.

Research Project

This project actually blew my mind! I thought it would be cool to be a test subject to try out a project my principal investigator was working on - the Gamified Physical Therapy Rehabilitation System. Essentially, you contol a game character to dodge obstacles by flexing your calf muscles. Think of this like Flappy Bird except it makes your legs stronger.

What I got out of this: I wanted to gamify a process that people were unmotivated to do or complete.

Playing the Violin

After 6 years of practicing, one thing I’ll never miss is trying to master the bowing techniques. I vividly remember staring at the mirror and trying the bend my elbow the right way to get my bow to glide straight down. Unfortunately, I would make a screeching sound at every attempt.

This issue is pretty common for those starting off on the violin. Seeing that this was a problem most students could not perfect on the first try, I figured this was a perfect problem to solve using my programming skills and experiences.

What I got out of this: I wanted to gamify the process of learning violin bowings for beginner violin students and provide them real-time feedback.