Monday, 7 January 2008
Final Idea, Few!
First working day of 2008, a fresh monday morning, said to be the busiest day for accountants and divorse lawyers, ouch! However, For myself the day has proved to be rather productive. Mike Blow and I went through several ideas I have developed involving the rorschach test and both agreed it's an interesting subject to stick to, but a digital ink blot test designed by the user could be quite bland and also tricky to develop for such a limited interactive. So, after discussion and a contrast of colourful thoughts I have succesfully developed a concrete idea! The new improved idea is an interaction rorschach installation piece. Ok, the room is slit equally into two halves. One halve is for the viewer, the otherside, for now is an open space where the user is not permitted. The user walks around the room,the user is picked up by a webcam pointing from the ceiling. THe webcam picks up the movment of the user, where by it then follows the users steps (trail) by leaving ink blot images where ever the user steps, creating a inkblot pattern through the users footprints. The other halve of the room then mirrors the exact same pattern the user has printed through their steps, creating a similar looking inkblot. The user can then see the image they have created not knowing that it has been mirrored in the other side. Therefore they have produced there own ink blot!
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3 comments:
Yo Miss Knight,
Loving your idea, Im doing something similar with a web cam which tracks the movments of the viewers and I havnt been able to find any flash tutorials ect. to find out how its done. I was just wondering if you know of any? xx
Hi Naomi,
I like this idea - think it would be a very popular interactive installation.
What you need to start off are some flash motion trackers. Here are some links:
Nasty pixel
and a useful tutorial
here
The other thing to consider is this: develop the system on your laptop webcam if you have one, but leave yourself some time to tweak it when you try and transfer it to an external webcam. Lighting in the room can make a big difference to how these sort of things work. That said, your project will essentially be tracking a dark blob (person) against a light background (floor) so shouldn't be too hard.
All you need then is to sample the position of the person every half second or so, and draw an expanding ink blob on the flash movie at that point (plus, the mirror point of course)...
Good Luck!
Mike
Mike, Naomi, Beth:
Using flash for that wouldn't be a good idea. For video tracking like that, a better solution would be installation toolkits like Max/MSP/Jitter, or VVVV (both use OpenCV for tracking, which is perfect for that kind of stuff). Flash can do some of the stuff these both do, much in a much more limited fashion.
Also, following "bubbles" of color work but requires an extremely controled background and foreground. This can work but it's hard. Using background subtraction is a better idea. It can be done in flash with some quick BitmapData subtraction tricks, plus threshold and detecting color boundaries for object tracking. If it's gonna be just one person at a time, it's a great solution.
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