Depth, Boundaries and Human Interaction

This team explored the possibilities of inferring human body shapes in public space in real-time. They created ‘virtual breakpoints’ which visitors can walk through.

This means walking from a virtual sunny beach, to a city at night. All the time, a shadowy silhouette follows along. You can try to approach the mystery figure, but she or he was always one step ahead.

Technical Challenges

Most of the coding was done in openFrameworks and the sound design was created with Abelton Live. The visuals, including characters, players, stages, and a scene were created in the 3D program Blender.

A bug was discovered from one of the plug-ins’ relationship with the Mavericks OS: If you don’t keep the computer mouse moving all the time, the computer freezes and locks up.

Joelle found that learning and mastering OpenCV and blob tracking were big technical hurdles considering the short timeframe provided. Tyler had webcam issues with what is referred to as a squiggly blob and made the rest of the settings into an XML file.