God with laser pen

Client: HyperIsland AB (Karlskrona, Sweden)

During "Experience Technology" module at HyperIsland (that's where I study now) all students were divided in groups. Each group got own piece of hardware, like Bluetooth, GPS or mouse. Our group got projector and digital camcorder.

So what is this thing, anyway?

All we got was projector and digital camcorder. We had to create something from these pieces, but we couldn't use anything else. Except PC and software, obviously.

My idea was to create motion detection project. We covered the walls in our presentation room with black material, so it was really dark there. Then I made little Flash presentation, which had planets spinning and rotating across the Sun. And you can interact with planets with help of mouse cursor — throw planets futher in space, bring them back... Usual control-the-Universe stuff.

The tricky part.

The next step was motion detection itself. Digital camcorder was connected to laptop via FireWire and I wrote program in C# that captures video stream from camcorder and analyzes it, detecting actual movements. We decided to use regular laser pen to enhance precision of motion detection and after some more tweaking and testing, it worked fine. And then you just convert that motion to cursor movement on screen.

The joy of testing.

So basically it works like this. There is a Flash demonstration of planets, spinning in space. You can interact with them by pushing and pulling them with mouse cursor. The laptop itself connected to projector, which shows this demostration on 4x2 meters wall. Then there is camcorder, which films everything happening on that wall. Camcorder is connected to the same laptop as well. Laptop is also running C# application, which detects motion in video stream from camera and converts that to mouse movements. Which in turn allows you to control plants.

You are standing in the middle of room, staring at these huge planets spinning on the wall in front of you. And you also have laser pen. Let's say you don't like that Mars planet, after all. So just make this "swoop" gesture with your laser pen and planet will be thrown back in space.

You'd better experience this by yourself.