Augmented Health: Tai Chi Tintin

Vera Gold and Hannah Liu
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Tintin, a fun cartoon. Tai chi, an ancient activity designed to enhance the body, mind, and spirit. Combine the two, and a quirky exercise application is sprung into existence.

Tai Chi Tintin is an interactive application that is designed to make exercise fun, safe, and informative.  Users can either follow along to the tai chi routine or click on various body parts to learn about how tai chi affects the body in addition to tai chi facts and tips to keep in mind while practicing tai chi. 

Our finalized product went through many layers of evolution. During the brainstorming process, we came up with many ideas for applications. An app that would scan medicine labels and provide complex diagrams of how that medicine worked within molecular levels in the body. A nutrition app that would predict your health over time. An exercise app that would highlight the muscles being used on a 3D model and show the user how to properly perform exercises in correlation to certain health disorders. We played around with different app aesthetics and features. Ultimately, the ideas that we conjured up would be better implemented in the long term and expanded into business models so  we decided to just enjoy the project-creating process and have fun exploring new programs. 

We created base avatars and models and conducted research on various exercises. Along the way, we upgraded our base model and decided to add Tintin's features onto our avatar, stylized in our own way. Tai chi was an exercise that was frequently mentioned during our research time due to its simple, non-aggressive nature. People in a wide range of ages and physical abilities can practice this activity. Older people or people who have a difficult time exercising because it takes a toll on their body will find our application fun, informative, and engaging. It is our hope that we can inspire people to create healthy habits and use this activity to gain knowledge and to be in tune with their body, mind, and spirit. 

Adobe Illustrator was utilised to create our base models and Tintin avatar. Each body part was created in layers so they could be easily exported into Unity, the game development program that was used to create our app. Most of the things we developed and used were brand-new to us so our ideas were a bit too ambitious due to our skill-set and time restraints. However, we decided on a fun idea that we were able to implement!