when the ID was born
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008The first babysteps were made in 2005 with the presentation of my final exam:
The Idea was to create a billboardlike display that would “recognize” a person coming by, and start playing interactive content. That content was supposed to approximately be in line with the “customers” needs. Therefore we would have had to categorize people into target groups in realtime only by a webcam and recognition software. That was, I must admit, at least one step beyond of what me and Marc Isele were able to do in a couple of months. So we decided to focus on achievable things: Basicly realtime Effects like Motion tracking and keying.
We dicided to start our work with Processing, an open source Framework for digital artists based on Java. Our first success was realtime keying. By taking a reference picture we were able to separate “new” pixels from the reference pixels. But one had to be out of the cameras range for a while, and it didn’t work with complex backgrounds. We improved the Algorithm so that a reference image was no longer necessary, but the background problem seems to be a very complex one and couldn’t be solved until now. If anyone has solved that Problem and is willing to commit solutions to the Community, he or she can do it right here!
The next step was to program a solid motion tracking Algorithm. Due to the lack of time we decided to keep it simple: We took one single line of pixels out of the webcam image (exactly in the middle of the image). With the keying function we could mark those pixels that were “active”, so it was easy to calculate the middle of the Silhouette of a person standing and moving in front of the Display. Unfortunately it didn’t work with people below a certain height, for example little children. But for the upcoming presentation that was totally ok. I was studying Communication Design. Presenting a work, based on a moreless self developed software was quite unusual (back then), so nobody there would mock about the rather horrible code we wrote or about some teething problems. Now that we are going public this is different. So please be lenient towards us. We are working on object oriented Versions of I.D.
