“…how, in the muddy expanse, is one to pin down a catfish, smooth and covered with slime, using an empty capacious gourd, slippery and round?”
Projection Prep
I’ve ping-ponged emails back and forth to EC and IM Lab regarding equipment borrowing and it was such a mess this week. Plus for some reason I forgot this is the week when all four classes stack on top of another in deadlines so I was pretty much dead. Regarding borrowing, I’ve contacted Dustin and confirmed a fix on my part at least. I’ve also contacted Stefania and we’re planning to hang things by next week which also means there’s not really a lot of things to move or squeeze around in our small space.
Knowing that we are going to track from the top, I’ve prepared a backup method and practiced with something called Blobtracking. In computer vision, detecting blobs(regions) that differ from their surroundings is a common and powerful technique. A blob can be as simple as a spot of light in an image or as complex as a moving object in a video. This matters because we are going to look from the top using our depth cameras, hence we need to distinguish between heads, floor projection, and floor surface.
Considerations moving forward
One of our biggest hurdle right now is using the lights to configure the space ambiance. As we’ve tried last week, the Neopixels LED strips were not sufficient to create the soft light vibes we aim. As such, I’ve researched and consulted with several people including electricians what kind of lights should we try using for on our project. It all boils down to two: APA102 or Addressable COB Light.
Essentially, the key takeaway I get is that as we are going to aim for a bigger scale on Project Space, there’s many considerations and awareness that we need to know when using higher power lights, such as power supply and controlling the data stream. Also knowing that next semester we will have less times plus a bunch of other hurdles, I looked up for COB Lights that we can use easily but trading off by “cheesing” our design.
