Featured on
PC World, Destructoid, KinectHacks.net
Objective
Use the Microsoft Kinect to create an engaging piece of interactive computational art
My contributions
Project concept
Algorithms & code for Boo positioning, object occlusion, Boo scaling, Boo rotation, and Boo floating motion
Mario Boo drawn in real space with Kinect, by Horstman & Kurani from John Horstman on Vimeo.
The idea behind this project was to use the Kinect to create an illusion for the viewer that items displayed on the computer screen existed in the real world. This is accomplished by drawing a virtual character on-screen in a location that the viewer can’t see in the real world – i.e., the viewer’s “blind spot.” The virtual character moves to stay in the viewer’s blind spot as the user moves around, so that the viewer can never see the real-world location of where the virtual character would be.
For the virtual character we selected the “Boo” ghost from the Super Mario Brothers video game series. In the games, the Boo sneaks up on Mario when Mario is facing away from Boo. When Mario faces Boo, Boo stops advancing on Mario and hides his face. Boo’s behavior is similar enough to our goal behavior to make him a great candidate to star in our project.
Process
All programming for this project was performed in openFrameworks. The following addons made our project possible:
- ofxKinect – Processing Kinect input
- ofxOpenNI – Skeleton recognition
- ofxVectorMath – Vector calculations
We worked toward our vision in the following sequence:
Running the OpenNI skeleton recognition successfully in openFrameworks
Placing Boo in relation to the tracked skeletons
Vector calculation for Boo location
Depth calculations for Boo/object occlusions
Swapping Boo images to face the user
Scaling Boo based on distance from the Kinect camera
Sound effects & background music
Props
We owe the success of this project to the following people:
Golan Levin
Dan Wilcox
Ben Gotow
Contributors to the ofxKinect and ofxOpenNI libraries
