In 2012 Harvey Mudd College computer science faculty and students and I made a Kinect-based avatar that tracks user movements onto a virtual chimpanzee. We tried the model on a screen with a chimpanzee at the Edinburgh Zoo, who was pretty interested.

After this experiment we realized we had the technology to teach humans about chimpanzee facial expressions and emotions. There are Facial Action Coding datasets for both homo sapiens and pan troglodytes. So we created a proposal for a zoo kiosk as well as a role playing game.

We wrote two fully fleshed out NSF AISL grant proposals for a chimpanzee role playing game, if anyone out there is interested.