Live POV Distortion of Video Mapping

They seem to be using a Playstation Move sensor to distort the video map in relation to the camera's point of view.

This demands further research.

Link via Redit.

3D Cold Fog Gesture Interface

"The company uses a stream of cold fog to project images onto it and an infrared camera to capture gestures. Unlike oversized body movements which Microsoft Kinect analyze and process using motion camera and infrared depth sensors, Displair solves a bigger challenge of detecting and interpreting finer movements of hands."

3D gesture interface

Link via Tech Crunch.

Computer Vision: Sign Language - Dance

Just noticed an article on TechCrunch about the Kinetic Space Framework project. Check out the video they linked to below. According to the write up the software is able to detect subtle gestures down to the level of Sign Language. While the video below doesn't show this particular feature off -if it works on a practical level- then this opens the door to an intriguing level of human-computer interfaces. Now if I can only figure out how to get the information it generates out through OSC . . .

The Kinect SDK has been released!

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/

An Idiot With a Tripod

There is a little bit of buzz going on about this short film. It is a direct homage to Dziga Vertov's Man and a Movie Camera. It was shot with a Canon 7D by Jamie Stuart during a blizzard in New York on December 26th 2010. I say that there is some buzz about it because apparently Roger Ebert has suggested that it may be Oscar worthy.

I found this via Good.

Dear Santa,

At the pace videos like the one below are coming out, it seems like the Kinects hacks are really going to be offering up some interesting results in the next few months.

The Man and the Movie Camera

The Man and the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov.

" . . . Vertov stands halfway between Baudelaire's Flaneur and today's computer user: no longer just a pedestrian walking down a street, but not yet Gibson's data cowboy who zooms through pure data armed with data-mining algorithms. In his research on what can be called "kino-eye interface," Vertov systematically tried different ways to overcome what he thought were the limits of human vision. He mounted cameras on the roof of a building and a moving automobile; he slowed and sped up film speed; he superimposed a number of images together in time and space temporal montage within a shot). Man with a Movie Camera is not only a database of city life in the 1920's, a database of film techniques, and a database of new operations of visual epistemology, but also a database of new interface operations that other aim to go beyond simple human navigation through physical space." -Lev Manovich The Language of New Media

Portfolio Review - Miranda July

Miranda July - Performance Artist / Film Director / Author / Installation Artist

MirandaJuly.com

When you first arrive at Miranda July's website you are invited to enter a secret password:

(Images are screen captures from Miranda July's website. All images are © of Miranda July unless otherwise noted.)

Though I have not done an exhaustive exploration of any Easter-eggs hidden behind the password script it seems as though most anything that gets typed in leads to the main website. A quick glance at the opening pages source code does turn up a line with the following in it: ". . . title="you don't really want to cheat, do you?">another way in /