Jarod Romankiw – Computer Vision Gestures

For this project, I wanted to focus on a certain muscle in the body. I noticed that after spending a few hours on the computer, my neck would get sore. This is because I would stay in the same position and not stretch. I came up with a little game to try and help stretch my neck when using a computer. So I created a floating table which can be controlled by the movements of my head. I can go up and down, and rotate the plate. I had to combine a few templates of code to make this work. And I had to study how the physics work for the bouncing ball. Since I wanted to control the ‘base’ plane, i.e. where the ball bounces off of, I had to go into the help files to find a solution.

Choosing the appropriate scale was really important because you can increase the difficulty of keeping the ball on the plate by making the scale very sensitive. And since the data from the CV is very noisy, I had to be careful because the plate can have a tendency to flip if not appropriately scaled.

Ideally, I wanted the plate to rotate in 3D space, but the FaceOSC wasn’t communicating with MAX, despite using the provided template files. Did I have to install something(?)

This game is really fun to play around with, and I spent too long being distracted with it…enjoy!

(Waiting to add a sound effect on the bounce of the ball. Josh said ‘Stay Tuned’ 😉 )

3 Comments Add yours

  1. Adam Moran says:

    Definitely an interesting input method for a balancing game. As it is, though, I don’t understand why you put the webcam display on the ball.

  2. Thai Dao says:

    This is a creative idea. You can make to pad smaller and the ball bouncy to make it more challenging (and potentially neck-breaking)

  3. Noah Hillman says:

    I love the reasoning behind the your game, and that it probably took you time in front of a computer to make it in the first place. Making the ball bouncy would make it more interesting, but I like that as is it is more of a neck stretching game.

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