Interactive Art and Computational Design, Spring 2012

KelseyLee-project4-starMagic

by kelsey @ 6:12 am 27 March 2012

Inspiration

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XChxLGnIwCU]
reference: 3:48
I was inspired by the scene in Fantasi where Mickey Mouse is controlling everything with just a flick of his hand. I thought about controlling a stream of stars and wanted to do so as if I was conducting them into the sky.

Iteration 1 – using NyArToolkit, Processing

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ3wiq5sfq8&feature=youtu.be]
I started with NYArToolkit because originally I wanted to use Augmented Reality (via the iPhone). I used a marker to trigger the creation of a “star” and it would slowly float to the top of the screen after being generated. This was a big laggy though because the marker couldn’t be moved around very fast. Also, poor lighting conditions meant that this did not always work.

Iteration 2 – Kinect, OpenNI, Processing

I shifted over to the Kinect and started using OpenNI. Since I only wanted to detect hand positions this would be a fairly simple task. To create a star the behavior was a flicking motion, with the hand needing to be a certain distance from the shoulder, and having moved past another threshold from the previous to the current frame. The floating behavior of the stars is the same, but with this more robust generation, I made it so more stars would be created. Each star also has a life span so that eventually they fade into the sky and can be replaced by new stars.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF45e88PQ4w&context=C4c36d84ADvjVQa1PpcFM1HfZ6AxrMHcwChmgbdl1T1QqLTmhl84Q=]
(And thank you to Kaushal Agrawal)

Comments (1)

1 Comment

What does it mean?
I love the idea of the project.
are you going to add sound? the stars look really great, and the fade into sky is neat too
The end result is pretty, I like how it has a very cartoony aesthetic for the sky.
Need longer video, hard to see demo.
I agreee, we need a longer video demo.
Cool stuff! I am happy that you moved from the ARToolkit to the kinect. I think the interaction with simply your hands is much better and more fun than with those patterns. I would add some music to that video, to add to the experience of “being mickey mouse” in that movie.
Nice project.
Really cool. I like how your project captures a moment from our childhood that we’ve all acted out, yet never with technology, only with our imagination. You let us act it out. Great!
Star effects are fun, and I also like the cartoon-like sky on your background.
I agree with Golan: blending the virtual and real worlds is really cool.+3 Personally, I was interested in how you did the gesture recognition, because I’ve never done that. I also think that the Kinect made more sense for this project than ARToolkit. Good call on that one.

Looks magical! Building up the environment would definitely add to the feel.
I like that you experimented with both ArToolkit and Kinect!
Looks pretty joyful. Or perhaps you were just delirious at the end of all that coding :P
This is awesome idea and very nicely executed.
Looks like you did a lot of work, great final product!
GL: I really like the gradual fade from real to virtual world. I think this is extremely well-done, with a strong visual intution.

Comment by admin — 28 March 2012 @ 12:18 pm