Tumble Weed ICM

Icm Finale. Created with Win Lei Ng.
Finale floor projection, tracking car movement.

We set off wanting to track human movement, which controls a self propelling ball, which leaves a projected drawing on the floor.
Not such a simple idea after all…

http://itp.nyu.edu/~tsr267/MyPOV/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/cosmicTumbleWeed.pdf
At the first stage we built a projection that tracks mouse movement:
Simulation 01- Tracking mouse movement, simulating by the sphere folloing you, leaving a track of res ellipses, simulating the speed of the movement with the size of the ellipse.

ScreenRecording 01 from Talya Stein Rochlin on Vimeo.

Simulation 02- Tracking if the mouse stopped moving, by the sphere rolling around you, leaving a track of little blue ellipses.

ScreenRecording 02 from Talya Stein Rochlin on Vimeo.

Next we tried out the projection on the floor. We facked the tracking be moving the mouse manually.


The next stage was to track the human. We put a light on the useres head, and tracked the movment by video tracking the brightest light.

We run in to many problems.
1. Projecting on the floor. We didn’t take in to consideration the shad the user drops on the floor. And we realized the projection and the video capturing need to be in the same size.
2. Tracking the brightest light. The projection itself is quit bright, which competes with the brightness of the user.
3. We still haven’t figured out how to write the code asking when the user is moving and when the user stopped moving.
4. Translating the movement of the human from a 2D stage to Left Right and front coordinates to the car.
5. Moving the sphere itself. Having enough tork in the car to self propel not only itself, but to move a whole ball.

Future planes:
1. Adding front and back light to the car to know it’s direction.
2. Tracking the light with better coding. Now it’s tracking the light with OpenCV, but the detection isn’t stable enough.
3. Different responses to different movement.
4. The car will become a sphere. It will be put in to a ball and become a self propelling sculpture.

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