A Motion Capture Experience
This is a project I did in collaboration with Lauren Noble using the Xbox Kinect, Christie Digital Microtile wall, and Processing.
How it all began
As the result of one late night conversation, Lauren and I were feeling inspired to try and take advantage of the resources made available to us by our campus. This inspiration drove us into the tech sandbox on our campus known as the Engage Lab where we played with just about everything to try and find some inspiration.
After some searching, we eventually landed on the Xbox Kinect as the piece of tech we wanted to try and build for, so we set to it.
The Idea
From the beginning, we knew we wanted to build something for the Christie Microtile wall within our campus, but we were unsure of exactly what to build. Eventually, we decided to try and build a game that allowed the player to climb up the wall while using their arms as controllers. With this idea, we began trying to get our Kinect working with our language of choice, Processing.
The Demo / The Product
After a few weeks, we had our skeletal tracking system working properly, and even had some shapes linked to different body parts. Coincidentally, when we had got this far we heard about the Fall Open House our campus puts on every year and thought it would be a great opportunity to demonstrate our work. We decided to ask some of our administrators if this was possible, and they were more than happy to accommodate.
At this point in time, our game was nothing more than a skeleton on a screen, and we had two days to create something worth demonstrating, so we decided to create a simple interactive physics playground that people could use when walking past the wall.
Our demo program draws a line between the hands of the user that will bounce off of the balls falling from the top of the window. It’s simple, but we thought it was super fun to play with, and it serves as a great demonstration of the motion capture experiences that can be created with the Kinect.
