Food Flight

MoCap arcade cabinet · Commercial product · Founder, Gesture Art and Design

The other two case studies on this site are client work. This one is mine. Through Gesture Art & Design, the company I co-founded, I took a full-body motion-capture arcade game from concept to a manufactured, coin-operated product on arcade floors. In April of 2023, my friend and I drew up some ideas on the back of a napkin. In November of 2023, Food Flight won an IAAPA 2023 Brass Ring Award.

Around 2023, VR was the “obvious” way to sell immersion at an arcade. Hidden by that industry marketing story, operators were actually quite concerned about reliability and broken headsets and tethers. Players were concerned about pink eye. The bet behind Food Flight was that depth sensors and gesture recognition had gotten good enough and cheap enough to deliver body-driven immersion with no wearables at all.

Food Flight is a freestanding attendant-free arcade cabinet running time of flight sensors and reasoning about the room. Before a player inserts a credit, the game is already pulling them in and responding to their intentions. A carny-bot charms passersby from ten feet away. Who doesn’t like a good carny-bot?

A commercial arcade cabinet is a business machine, and I made the operator’s problems my design constraints. The only mechanical devices are the speakers and computer fans, because moving parts are downtime. There’s never a reason for a player to touch the device, so no buttons are getting beat on nor are any joysticks getting cranked.

An arcade is an uncontrolled environment. Groups pass in front of active players. Young children and adults in the same play session.

I watched one absolute hero do this:

Food Flight treats all of that as allowed by default.

Consulting pages love the phrase “end to end.” Every problem between “what if” and a pallet leaving a factory floor in Taiwan crossed my desk on this one.