Exercise: Media Controller
Video:
Component:
1 * Arduino Uno
1 * USB-B to A Cable
1 * 10K Potentiometer
Several Jumper Cables
Process:
The video clip I used was created by Chait Goli called A Tower Beside A River. You can find the link to this video here on pexels.com. What I wanted to make in this recitation is a controller that can jump to different frames of the video. Therefore, users will have a feeling that as they rotate the potentiometer, the camera also moves towards the direction they are rotating. There are two steps involved to make this controller. At first, I need to set up the Arduino part and transfer the potentiometer readings from Arduino to Processing, which can be done by the template we currently have. However, I happened to find the original video was in 4K resolution so my laptop could not display the entire frame. I used VLC to lower its resolution into 1280 * 720 and it worked. The next step is to incorporate the readings to the Processing example for videos with the readings from Arduino. Although the codes worked well, the effect was not what I quite wanted. Every time I rotate the potentiometer, there is a delay for the transition of frames and as you can see in the video above, the transition between each frame is not very smooth. I asked Leon about this question and he advised me to increase the frameRate from 30 to 60. In the end, I increased it to 120 and the situation is slightly better. According to him, if I really want to realize my plan, I would better use photos instead of an entire film clip because Processing needs to load the entire video over and over again. This experience I had during this recitation made me know that sometimes our idealized effect are bound to the limitations of hardware and we need to figure out alternative ways to duplicate the effect.
Reflection:
I find it amazing that the earliest interactive artworks appeared in the 1960s, which means that the idea of involving the entire human body into the interaction with computers is not new at all. Compared to the projects mentioned in this article, such as Messa di Voce and LIMBOTIME. I believe that the ways of interaction I used in my project could not bring a novel feeling to the users. Making use of potentiometers is not that different from the traditional keyboards or mouses because computers could only sense the human movement through their hands, while for computer vision projects, it is often the case that the entire human body would be captured as an input. What is more, the output of my project is only some changes within the frame itself. I am thinking that maybe we should make the users more engaged in the interaction process by presenting their bodies in the visual output. By using computer vision algorithms, the users would be able to get more customized feedbacks, which can really amaze them. That’s the effect I think would attract a wide range of audience and really reveal the power of interaction.