Juggling Video Tracker
This program uses a video camera in order to track a person juggling multiple balls. The position of the balls and the person's arms and face are detected, and may be used to trigger video and audio.
Control scripts are written in Javascript, which allows the user to fully control the output of the system.
Performances
The system has been used in performance several times. The first public performance was at Derby Juggling Club's 'Twaddle' caberet night in November 2007. Recently, I performed with the system to an audience of about 500 people at Design Camp 08 in New Zealand, and demonstrated and performed with it at Creativity and Cognition 2007. I have also done several smaller performances with the system.
The performance I am currently developing is called 'Juggling like a Bicycle'. It is a silly comedy juggling & story-telling performance that I first developed as a standard juggling act. Adapting this kind of narrative performance to work within the juggling system is an interesting challenge, as the performance needs to be flexible to cope with audience response. It is also interesting to try and move away from the 'pretty trails of light' type of abstract visualisations that I've worked with previously into something more silly and jokey. I've performed this a couple of times now, and it is fascinating to see the difference in audience reaction in this less traditionally 'artistic' performance.
Demo Videos
These videos are basically technical demonstrations of the tracking system.
This is a demo (July 2007) of some effects that have been implemented in the system.
This is a brief and very old (May 2006) demo of the system. Right click and save as to download.
Random Stuff
The pictures above show some odd juggling patterns inspired by the system, they are interesting, because the juggling part looks pretty stupid, and only makes sense when combined with the system itself.
BMVC
This tracker is the demo application used in the BMVC 2006 paper "Using Object Interactions to Improve Particle Filter Performance". The samples for that paper are available here.
Stuff I have published about it
BMVC 2006
Paper about the vision algorithms
Creativity and Cognition 2007
Description of the demonstration
Paper presented at graduate symposium
