Elevator Project: Motion Tracking

For my group project in Physical Computing, we have decided to address the issue of people waiting outside of elevators and the boredom that inevitably occurs during the wait. Petra, Sunghun, and myself all agreed that a good way to break the static nature of waiting is to allow people to interact with something that has immediate output in correlation with their movements. This allows those waiting to interact quickly with limited effort, thus making the amount of time one actually has to wait for the elevator to arrive non-consequential, which matters a great deal since upon arrival, the elevator could be very close to arriving, or not at all.

My part in the project has been developing the software - using Java/Processing for the graphics and motion tracking system, as well as C coding for the Arduino microprocessor we are using. The motion tracking system does a combination of background subtraction and motion detection, which basically filters out all imagery which not both moving and not within a certain brightness range. The pixels that meet these prerequisites have their coordinates tracked and drawn on using a combination of small rectangles of lines being drawn between each tracked pixel in sequential order, which results in an abstraction of imagery that is vastly different from real-life, yet familiar enough to be predictably interacted with, at least in the regard towards positioning oneself towards making an intended impact on a defined space.


Fig 1.1: Although heavily abstracted, a face emerges through motion.


Fig 1.2: Rapid motion completely destroys all recognizable form, as intended.


Fig 1.3: Slight motion will in turn bring about only slight abstraction, to
the point of nearing a keyed cutout of the form.

Processing:
ProcessingMain
MotionCapture

Arduino:
cb_software