frock stars celebrates the australian fashion week with an exhibition put on at the powerhouse museum. i was fortunate enough to contribute to the event with two interactive installations which allow the user to style the hair and makeup of a virtual model with the use of real physical styling tools.
in the video you can see people using objects such as the hair dryer and curling tongs as the controllers to the interactive experience. it was important that these objects were as close as possible to the real thing, which in the early scoping eliminated the use of markers and eventually lead to the use of colour tracking as the main computer vision method for identifying and tracking the objects.
colour tracking proved to be quite accurate thanks to the use of flouro colours which stood out more from the surrounding environment and were less likely to clash with people’s clothing (unless the 80s made yet another comeback!). each of the two interactives were fitted with a affordable fire-i camera, which allows to configure most capture settings including the ability to turn off the EVIL auto-gain.
the above photo shows the colour tracker passing data into flash. the colour tracking software was written using openFrameworks and communicated with flash via a socket connection. openFrameworks did all the tracking while flash took care of all the pretty graphics, animations and video. there is some more info under this OF post.
here is the source code to the colorTracker.