Electronic Arts READ
C#, Unity

EA READ is a unique game that teaches kids to learn how to read by gamifying reading through voice recognition, animation and story progression.

Summary:

EA READ was a research project for Electronic Arts to explore their Connected-TV platform. Our goal was to explore how voice recognition could be used to encourage children to read through the platform:

  • The platform allowed mobile devices to communicate with computer & TV applications through JSON messages using a Node.js server (like Jackbox Games)
  • We utilized the phone's processing power to create an interactive karaoke reading experience for kids
  • To teach kids reading, we guided kids to follow by example and learn by repetition
  • To make our Connected-TV experience intuitive for kids, we animated objects dropping down from TV -> phone and floating up from phone -> TV, creating a mental spacing of both devices
  • We integrated and tested two speech recognition libraries, Google Speech API and CMU Sphinx, to provide immediate feedback

Scope:

5 months | 6 person team | C#, Unity

My Contributions:

  1. Wrote a Unity MVC framework to help convert, animate and add existing childrens books into our digital project
  2. Implemented karaoke highlighting of words by parsing a spreadsheet of dialogue times and manipulating the word text when read
  3. Animated and brought storybooks to life through Unity’s animation system and key framing
  4. Simplified the animation process by making relevant functions more modular so that they could be called during the key framing process
  5. Programmed gameplay logic for communicating and sending messages between the mobile controller and the Unity application

Results:

Unfortunately, EA abandoned the Connected-TV platform and the project was discontinued. Nonetheless, I believe the game design and execution had a lot of potential:

  • We conducted multiple live playtests with local Pittsburgh schools and the kids enjoyed their experience
  • Survey feedback from peers and teachers were very positive, saying the content was interactive, educational, and executed well