Etude Number 4
Etude Number: 4
Basic Details: It’s about using a physical interface for control Google Earth
Name: Sophia
Pathway Combination: Advertising with Digital Arts
The title of your etude: Hand Gesture interface for Google Earth
A short statement of intentions
My initial thought for this was create something to track spontaneous hand gestures like grabbing, pulling, reaching and rotating.
Conceptualisation of the work
The purpose of the etude was to show the audience other ways to control Google Earth. This is aimed at anyone who is interested in hand gesture interface.
Documentation of Technical and Artistic Process
Technical Analysis
For it to work, a small camera is attached to a computer. The camera then translates each LED-enabled motion into a set of possible actions such as panning , zooming, rotation and tilting. The video tracking functionality is written within the Processing programming framework, in conjunction with Java’s java.awt.Robot library. This robot library converts a special video tracking vocabulary into mouse clicks/releases and cursor movement in order to control the computer.
The hand gesture interface for Google Earth is written in Processing, which is an open-source programming language based on Java.
Here is an example of a processing code for a 3D camera.
void setup()
{
size(200, 200, P3D);
noStroke();
}
void draw()
{
background(255);
lights();
//ortho(0, width, 0, height, -10, 10); // Default ortho settings
ortho(-width, mouseX, -height/2.0, mouseY/2.0, -10, 10);
translate(0, 0, -100);
rotateX(PI/4);
rotateZ(PI/3);
pushMatrix();
for(int i=0; i<width; i+=20) {
for(int j=0; j<height; j+=20) {
box(10, 10, (j+i) / 4.0);
translate(20, 0, 0);
}
translate(-200, 20, 0);
}
popMatrix();
}
References
http://earth.google.com/
http://processing.org/
How successful is the etude?
The etude was quite successful and I managed to get all the bits and pieces I needed for my project. The idea hasn’t been tested yet but hopefully everything will go very well.
