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DIY Motion Tracking for Public Spaces

Event Interactive 2011
Format Dual
Organizer Todd Greco Fashionbuddha
Description When designing interactive experiences for public spaces, worries about custom hardware and its limitations can derail the entire creative process. Performance is hampered by network latency, and setting up in custom spaces can be harrowing. After spending a year with open and closed source solutions, Fashionbuddha decided to write their own system to remove those issues -- Magnetic. Built in C++ atop the openFrameworks and Cinder libraries, Magnetic makes it easy to create applications that do motion and gesture tracking either with or without infrared markers. In addition to tracking multi-touch points, Magnetic can also discover joints and limbs on the fly, and then reports back positioning automagically. Magnetic’s direct integration into these existing frameworks allows creative programmers to quickly build high performance advanced interactive experiences. In this session, the Fashionbuddha team (@fashionbuddha) will walk through a series of projects that use this system, and shows how, when the technology takes care of the heavy lifting (and the hardware is simple and off-the-shelf), creativity can shine through. We’ll also show how a group of designers and developers raised on building online work in Flash learned to stop worrying and love low level programming languages.
Questions
Answered
  1. How can one bring interactive experiences to a public space?
  2. Can one do true motion detection and tracking without the use of IR LEDs?
  3. Are gestural interfaces appropriate for enviornmental interactive work?
  4. How does a Flash developer/designer make the leap to low-level programming languages?
  5. What software is appropriate for prototyping, and what software is appropriate for production code?
Level Advanced
Category Out There
Tags gesture, motiontracking, multitouch