A Video Game for Tai Chi Practice? Meet Project Ocelot

Every Tai Chi student knows the problem. In class, you can only see the teacher from wherever you happen to be standing. At home, your practice video shows one angle, at one speed, forever. The moment you want to see how the back foot turns — or slow a tricky transition down to a crawl — you’re stuck.

Project Ocelot is an unusual answer to that problem: a Tai Chi practice game, currently in development for Steam, that places a moving instructor inside a beautiful three-dimensional world — and hands you the camera.

You can walk right around the instructor mid-form and study the movement from any angle. Slow it down. Loop the section you’re working on. Switch to a first-person view and see the form through the instructor’s own eyes. Or simply practise alongside characters who move through the sequence with you in real time — like the best outdoor class you’ve ever joined, except this one is held on a misty mountainside inspired by the Taoist temples of Wudang, with waterfalls, drifting blossom, and nowhere else you need to be.

And the movement is real. The sequences were motion-captured from instructors with over thirty years of experience, so what you’re following isn’t an animator’s impression of Tai Chi — it’s the genuine article, recorded from bodies that have practised it for decades.

That authenticity runs through the whole project. Project Ocelot is being built single-handedly by Chris Simpson, a Tai Chi teacher and senior practitioner with more than forty years of practice. It’s less a product than a labour of love: an attempt to use game technology to pass on a living tradition, not just to gamify it.

Where to find it

The game is part of Tai Chi Elements, the project’s online home. To follow along:

• taichielements.com — learn more and sign up for updates
• A Steam page is on the way — the mailing list is the best way to hear the moment it goes live

Whether you’ve practised for decades or you’re simply curious about what happens when Tai Chi meets game technology, it’s worth keeping an eye on. Slow, deliberate, and quietly beautiful — much like the art itself.