Kinect-Driven Event Board · CMU IS Capstone 2012

Teudu

An interactive public event board with an invisible touch screen powered by the Kinect.

The Problem

CMU has no shortage of events — but students had no good way to discover them. Flyers get taken down, email lists get ignored, and organizations had no shared platform. Our Junior/Senior Information Systems capstone aimed to fix that with Teudu: a public digital event board that anyone could browse by waving their hand.

Prototype: Rails + Mouse Cursor

We started simple — a Ruby on Rails web application displaying event listings, controlled by a Kinect that emulated a mouse cursor. We deployed it in the student center and watched people try to use it.

Early Ruby on Rails prototype of Teudu showing event listings on a display screen — First prototype — RoR web app controlled by Kinect mouse. Students liked the concept but couldn't reliably interact with the cursor.

Event detail drill-down view in the Rails prototype — Event browse vs. detail drill-down. We learned early to keep the browsing view sparse — only posters — and reserve details for a selected event.

Users enjoyed the idea but couldn’t accurately control the cursor. The interaction model needed to change.

Final System: Natural Gesture Interface

We rebuilt the frontend as a dedicated Kinect WPF application — no mouse cursor, just gesture detection and a purpose-built UI. The design language drew from Microsoft’s Metro principles: fast in, find it, fast out.

Teudu Metro-style tile layout showing event cards on a large display — Metro-inspired tile layout. 'Get in, find what you need, get out' — minimal chrome, maximum clarity.

Teudu event tile with a live countdown badge showing time until event — Live tiles: if an event starts within the hour, a countdown badge appears on its tile automatically.

One major iteration driver was mutual awareness — the system needed to signal when it could see the user and what gesture it was interpreting. Without that feedback, users felt like they were waving into a void.

Final Teudu screen with gesture feedback indicators showing the system recognizing the user's hand position — The final interface with mutual-awareness cues. The system shows when it detects the user and which action it's reading — critical for natural-feeling gesture control.

Role

Led the project and built the WPF gesture interface, iterating through user testing until the system felt natural to use.