I thought it was really interesting how Myron Krueger–who developed Videoplace, one of the first interactive works of art using computer vision– did so because he believed that “the entire human body ought to have a role in our interactions with computers”. There is something very profound about how we’ve come to find both practical and artistic uses for our bodies and their movement in relation to computers. What’s even more fascinating is that Krueger’s work preceded computer mice!
This reading was very helpful, especially as I read it while I was beginning to work on my final project where I’m using computer vision with Processing for the first time. It really helped me narrow down what I wanted my code to do, and since computer vision has many uses and capabilities, I had to think about what would work best with my project’s aim. Since I want to separate the foreground from the background to sense whether the person in the camera’s view is in front of the display or simply walking in the background, brightness thresholding seemed to be the best option. Aaron and I discussed Daniel Shiffman’s OpenKinect library for Processing yesterday, and we looked through the examples to see how I could set a brightness or depth threshold.