Practice progression

I have lately been working on technical tasks related to my project, not that they are the most vital aspects but will give some idea to what is possible as I plan my final result/direction earlier to develop new ideas. The faster I move onto this the more time there is for the revision.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeHX5jzHFM4

One of the first issues I had towards the last semesters project was how well the interaction worked. It is vital and needs to be understandable for everyone. I want to know what my options are for this and what is possible to recreate. I have been looking for a stable and accurate way to track the hands or fingers of a person. So far the results vary, but with accuracy comes complexity. Most decent tracking systems point towards using a framework called OpenNI with a lot of other software required to perform. Unfortunately this has led to long read me files and broken links, eventually I was able to find out that even though the official website stated having a Mac beta version available that it is not actually possible because of Kinect SDK being required (Kinect SDK does not work on Mac. Now I am back to finding other solutions or alternatives. Right now I have found some more videos using Processing with the Kinect which look to be promising.

The other, less probable task was looking for a way to rerecord video from the stages in Isadora. What looked almost impossible (because of the dependency of the files loading to the media section in Isadora to be usable in Isadora) actually already included an actor to record files from video input devices connected to the laptop, such as a webcam. Unfortunately there was no plan to capture for stages. A trick around this was to make Isadora think there was a "capture" device connected. Instead using Camtwist it used the laptop display screen (including the stages) as video input for Isadora to detect and allowed for video file to be created. I might switch to something other than Camtwist as there are lots of options out there, but for now it will do. So progress.

In fact here is a video of the Isadora patch in action, using a really bad webcam.

References 

About OpenNI - 3D sensing Technology for depth sensors | OpenNI. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://www.openni.org/about/

CamTwist. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://camtwiststudio.com/

Download the Kinect SDK & Developer Toolkit | Kinect for Windows. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx

Installing OpenNI, NITE  and SensorKinect for Mac OS X. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://developkinect.com/resource/mac-os-x/install-openni-nite-and-sensorkinect-mac-os-x

Kinect Hand Processing - Gestures. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeHX5jzHFM4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

record stage - TroikaTronix Forum. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://troikatronix.com/troikatronixforum/discussion/790/record-stage/p1

Setting up the Kinect on OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion)- Coding Color. (n.d.). Retrieved August 26, 2013, from http://www.codingcolor.com/featured-articles/set-up-kinect-on-osx-10-8-mountain-lion/