Advanced Interfaces
Gesture Technology is when your movements are captured by a camera and used to control an experience in a computer. Gesture Technology has been pioneered by David Rockeby and Vincent Jon Vincent at GestureTek - both in Toronto. Our IMM students have visited Gesture Tech a number of times and used their hardware and software. David Rokeby came in and gave a talk to IMM at Sheridan.
Dan Zen provided a VideoMotion class in 2006 and used by hundreds of students at Interactive Interactive shows partnering with McMaster Multimedia and Communications Program. This was followed by the more widely used Ostrich Flash open source Flash framework for video motion capture with over 50,000 views and 5,000 downloads. Dan Zen used Ostrich Flash to make "Nerd" signs follow attendees at the Canadian New Media Awards as they walked down the hall - the theme was "A nerd's night out".
There has since been much progress in gesture technology with devices like the Kinect and Leap Motion. There are libraries that let people hook these interfaces into Flash and other programming languages. Our IMM students made a Fist Bump display at FITC where thousands of people gave fist bumps to an animated character and hooked themselves up through facebook and Flash. The campaign was a lot of fun and got good reviews.