Eyeballs are often watching us, but they’re usually embedded in the skull of another human or animal. When they’re staring at you by themselves, they can be altogether more creepy. This Halloween project from [allpartscombined] aims to elicit that exact spooky vibe.
The project relies on a Kinect V2 to do body tracking. It feeds data to a Unity app that figures out how to aim the eyeball at any humans detected in the scene. The app sends angle data to an Arduino over serial, with the microcontroller generating the necessary signals to command servos which move the eyeball.
With tilt and pan servos fitted and the precision tracking from the Kinect data, the eye can be aimed at people in two dimensions. It’s significantly spookier than simply panning the eye back and forth.
The build was actually created by modifying an earlier project to create an airsoft turret, something we’ve seen a few times around these parts. Fundamentally, the tracking part is the same, just in this case, the eye doesn’t shoot at people… yet! Video after the break.
People really are finding every cool way to use Kinect that doesn’t involve making a fun game using one.
Always thought that the tech for Kinect was a little too niche and not quite responsive enough for particularly involved gaming. I always did think Kinect was really cool hardware wise but since the start I had no idea how games would use it. And then we all found out how: games used it terribly. The best application was dancing for gods sake.
If you want a fast 3D interface the Leap Motion is probably what you might well want to use.
If I’m remembering correctly, from many years back, it could capture full body and grab the positions of all the joints or accurately track all ten digits on your hands at 200hz sample rate, as a bonus it didn’t need an additional power supply, just USB and it was about the size of a largrish usb memory stick. It was not as popular as the kinect but I don’t know why, it was certainly cheaper and more capable. The only thing it couldn’t do was capture overlaid video.
* Scratch the, full body capture, I think I was mistaken on that one.
Although there are a few interesting developer projects floating around, even as far as 3D scanning, because the resolution is pretty high.
I finally made one. I’m using the same Arduino Sketch but a different tracker based on OpenCV and OpenFrameworks and a Kinect V1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uV4S7RFqjM