Author: katehartman

I moved away from the idea of the puppet emulating you and onto the idea of the puppet responding to you. Rather than communicating between worlds, the two of you come to occupy the same space. I created a series of exercises to work through a few ideas I had.

In “Excuse Me”, the woman becomes annoyed when you enter her personal space.

[QUICKTIME http://itp.nyu.edu/~kh928/archives/ExcuseMe.mp4 160 137]

In “Follow”, she refuses to leave you alone.

[QUICKTIME http://itp.nyu.edu/~kh928/archives/Follow.mp4 160 137]

This is an idea using a setup similar to Vincent’s TouchScreen as a way to control video playback. Touching the screen with fingertips allows you to play small movies at the location where you touch. The movies are small in size, not much larger than the fingertips. They are short in length & looping. The number of times you tap your finger allow you to select which file will be played. Then holding your finger for several seconds in the same spot where you tapped causes the movie to start playing. It plays as long as you maintain contact. If you drag your finger, it follows. Just imagine tiny little videos on screen, following your fingers around.

In terms of content, I have a body of short videos that I made a few years ago based on my subjective interpretation of fragments of other people’s dreams. They are meant to be presented small, in a many screens within a screen sort of way. I originally presented them floating around in a grid-like formation, but I’d love to experiment with a more organic, live presentation. In this case, selection of videos would be random, not user-controlled, so the combination of videos on screen would be constantly changing.

I’d like to use live television as the image source rather than live feed from a camera. TV images would be replaced by preloaded clips of video (of my choosing) with the same RGB value. So I could watch interpreted TV, having a similar color experience as I would with the original, but viewing completely different content.

Uh oh! I feel myself being drawn down a familiar path. So when I’m sitting here trying to understand all this stuff, this “Java” stuff and this “video” stuff, I think of the most basic thing I could possible want to do, figure out how to do it, and then move on from there. So in terms of thinking about tracking, the most basic approach would be to track one thing moving and make something else move in the exact same way. That’s where the puppets come in. I guess my instinct is to personify things in order to better understand them. Track something in real life, make something move on the screen. So I’m basically looking at how tracking parts of the body or the body as a whole can allow you to move characters on the screen. Finger puppets. Hand puppets. Body puppets. So far I’ve been trying finger puppets using the multiple rectangle tracker, but I think I need to switch approaches, because my current setup produces really terrible results. But it’s a start. Perhap I need to try identifying skin blobs. Funny how the what I think of as the simplest thing still ends of taking me forever.

Vision for the future: People in orange jumpsuits jumping around in front of the camera to make their characters move on screen. Full body experience.