Me and Mari have been playing around with using infrared lights and the PS3 Eye camera to track the brightest point. We started off by using just a breadboard with infrared LED bulbs plugged into it. This seemed to work from a close distance pretty well, and we later tried it further away (around 15 feet) and it still seemed to consistently track the bulbs. The PS3 Eye camera is programmed to find the brightest point in the video, and draw an ellipse on the brightest point.
Next, we found a styrofoam ball in the fabrication area of the IM lab, and soldered infrared LEDs along its circumference through a wire. We hung this up on an extension cord in the IM lab, similar to our intention of using a hanging ball during the performance. The tracking seemed to be consistent and we only had LEDs on about a fifth of the ball, so placing more around it will definitely improve the cameras ability to track the ball. We hope that using a clear acrylic sphere and placing the LEDs inside of it will accomplish a more consistent tracking of the ball. We are hoping to use colored LEDs or a neopixel along with IR LEDs to create an aesthetically pleasing ball along with one that can be consistently tracked using infrared.
Finally, we used the capacitive touch example to send information from the Teensy to Openframeworks. We ran a wire from the Teensy to the styrofoam ball, and added some copper tape to make a portion of the sphere conductive for the capacitive touch. Using the serial inputs example, we were able to detect if someone was touching the part of the ball and create animations around the position of the sphere. In the video above, we simply made balls come out of the tracked position of the sphere when it was touched. We plan to make the ball touch sensitive so that whenever our performer Erica will touch it, there will be changes in the sketch to correspond with this. We are still not sure how we will make the entire acrylic sphere touch sensitive while making the wiring discreet.
We are happy with the progress that we made over the weekend, and for this next week we plan to create most of the visuals for the performance as well as hopefully have more consistent hardware created.