Ambush
This ia an interactive performance with computer vision, based on the music from the movie House of Flying Daggers.
Project by Jinyuan Li
Concept
In this project, I am trying to do some interactive things, like a stage performance. I find some dance which impressed me a lot, but finally I choose to just basing on the music that I want to dance. Movie House of Flying Daggers [1] is quiet impressed, especially the famous period “Beauty Song”. What this movie talking about is the emotion between the beauty killer and someone who was going to kill her. The first part music “No way out”, I choose the last part, which gives me a sense of soft and rigid, independence, sadness and entangled. In the second music “Leo’s eyes”, the lute musical instrument gives suddenly and renders a tense atmosphere, like a sword pierces the behind sound, which rendering a leisurely atmosphere. This kind of stark conflict is attractive.
Technology
I have several challenges when I approached this project. The first thing is making a decision, choosing which kind of camera to be used, Kinect or a standard camera like PS3 eye camera. I finally choose PS3 eye camera first, as it would be a good transition for me, and also consider my room’s environment, PS3 is more handy and convenient.
The second challenge is combining ofxBox2d with ofxOpenCV’s contourFinder. I tried lots of code, and read many references, but it always get stuck and crash the computer, even I finder just one contour. So I change mind to use ofxCV instead, which is much smooth, and has a good effect. Get an example with Monster shadows by Mesa di Voce [2].
The third challenges is get more familiar with computer vision, learning the new addons: ofxBox2d. To have a better understand of computer vision, I read some tutoriales [3,4] mainly, and also recover the tutorial in the department. I use frame differencing, background differencing and contour finder at last. In my project, you can see during the first part, I use contour finder, finding contours as the edges of 2dBox. The snow balls are falling randomly generated with 2dBox, when they touch my body contour, they be prevented falling down. Just like in the real physical world, snow balls will have a collision with the contours, and fall again by the gravity. In the second part, I use frame differencing and amplify my movement with some trails. There are two effects in the second part. First, generating random size flowers with my movement. Second, making my movement as a leader to lead flowers. For the background scenes, some made by code, some made by hand drawing. I use Fbo assemble the background and make a water reflection by noise.
Video by projector:
Further Development
After I finishing recording the video, I find that there are some things that are not considered carefully. In the first part, movement are more quicker than the snow balls falling, so some balls are ignored without interacting with my body.
Next step, I will try to use kinect, to do more interactive works.
Self evaluation
I am enjoying to do this interactive performance at first time. I am glad to realise some imagination in my mind. Figuring out more in computer vision part is a challenge but exciting process, it expands more spaces that I want to explore further.
As I am not a dancer, hope my performance not looks too clumsy.
Thanks for watching!
Reference
1.House of Flying Daggers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Flying_Daggers
2.Monster shadows, Mesa di Voce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STRMcmj-gHc
3.Computer vision (part 1), week 12, workshop in creative coding.
4.https://openframeworks.cc/ofBook/chapters/image_processing_computer_vision.html#pointprocessingoperationsonimages
5.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d3URBJLciEw
6.junkiyoshi.com
7.Addons that I have used:
ofxOpenCV
ofxCV
ofxBox2d
ofxPS3EyeGrabber