Are you ready to elevate your interactive possibilities without breaking the bank? If so, explore [Caio Bassetti]’s tutorial on creating a full 3D hand controller using only a webcam, MediaPipe Hands, and Three.js. This hack lets you transform a 2D screen into a fully interactive 3D scene—all with your hand movements. If you’re passionate about low-cost, accessible tech, try this yourself – not much else is needed but a webcam and a browser!
The magic of the project lies in using MediaPipe Hands to track key points on your hand, such as the middle finger and wrist, to calculate depth and positioning. Using clever Three.js tricks, the elements can be controlled on a 3D axis. This setup creates a responsive virtual controller, interpreting hand gestures for intuitive movement in the 3D space. The hack also implements a closed-fist gesture to grab and drag objects and detects collisions to add interactivity. It’s a simple, practical build and it performs reliably in most browsers.
For more on this innovation or other exciting DIY hand-tracking projects, browse our archive on gesture control projects, or check out the full article on Codrops. With tools such as MediaPipe and Three.js, turning ideas into reality gets more accessible than ever.
[Dominic]’s version has a similar classic look to the original, but embraces a more thoughtful approach. In it, one uses plain JavaScript to try to minimize the lander’s angle, velocity, and angular velocity in order to land safely on the generated terrain.
With all of the various keyboards, mouses (mice?), and other human interface devices (HID) available for our computers, there’s no possible way for developers to anticipate every type of input for every piece of software they build. Most of the time everything will work fine as long as some basic standards are kept, both from the hardware and software sides, but that’s not always the case. [Losso] noticed a truly terrible volume control method when visiting certain websites while also using a USB volume knob, and used this quirk to build a Breakout game with it.
It turns out his volume control knob would interact simultaneously with certain video players’ built-in volume control and the system volume for the operating system, leading to a number of undesirable conditions. However, the fact that this control is built in to certain browsers in the first place led to this being the foundation for the Breakout clone [Losso] is calling KNOB-OUT. Unlike volume buttons on something like a multimedia keyboard, the USB volume control knob can be configured much more easily to account for acceleration, making it more faithful to the original arcade version of the game. The game itself is coded in JavaScript with the source code available right in the browser.
If you’d like to play [Losso]’s game here’s a direct link to it although sometimes small web-based projects like these tend to experience some slowdown when they first get posted here. And, if you’re looking for some other games to play in a browser like it’s the mid-00s again, we’re fans of this project which brings the unofficial Zelda game Zelda Classic to our screens.
Sometimes it seems like ideas for projects spring out of nothingness from a serendipitous set of circumstances. [Maarten] found himself in just such a situation, with a combination of his existing Tetris novelty lamp and an awkwardly-sized window on a second-floor apartment, he was gifted with the perfect platform for a giant playable Tetris game built into that window.
To make the giant Tetris game easily playable by people walking by on the street, [Maarten] is building as much of this as possible in the browser. Starting with the controller, he designed a NES-inspired controller in JavaScript that can be used on anything with a touch screen. A simulator display was also built in the browser so he could verify that everything worked without needing the giant display at first. From there it was on to building the actual window-sized Tetris display which is constructed from addressable LEDs arranged in an array that matches the size of the original game.
There were some issues to iron out, as would be expected for a project with this much complexity, but the main thorn in [Maarten]’s side was getting his controller to work in Safari on iPhones. That seems to be mostly settled and there were some other gameplay issues to solve, but the unit is now working in his window and ready to be played by any passers-by, accessed by a conveniently-located QR code. Tetris has been around long enough that there are plenty of unique takes on the game, like this project from 2011 that uses Dance Dance Revolution pads for controllers.
We’ve all been victims of bad memes on the Internet, but they’re not all just bad jokes gone wrong. Some are simply bad as a result of being copies-of-copies, as each reposter adds another layer of compression to an already lossy image format like JPEG. Compression can certainly be a benefit in areas like images and videos, but [Michal] had a bit of a fever dream imagining this process applied to text. Rather than let the idea escape, he built the Lossifizer to add JPEG-like compression to text.
JPEG compression uses a system similar to the fast Fourier transform (FFT) called the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to reduce the amount of data in an image by essentially removing some frequency information. The data lost is often not noticeable to the human eye, at least until it gets out of hand. [Michal]’s system performs the same transform on text instead, with a slider to control the “amount of JPEG” in the output text. The code for this script uses a “perceptual” character map, clustering similarly-looking and similarly-sounding characters next to each other, resembling “leet speak” from days of yore, although at high enough compression this quickly gets out of hand.
One of the quirks that [Michal] discovered is that certain AI chat bots have a much less difficult time interpreting this JPEG-ified text than a human probably would have, which provides a bit of insight into how some of these algorithms might be functioning under the hood. For some more insight into how JPEG actually works on images, we posted about a deep dive into the image format a while back.
Who’d have thought that $30 doorbell cameras would end up being security liabilities? That’s the somewhat obvious conclusion reached by Consumer Reports after looking at some entry-level doorbell cameras available through the usual outfits and finding glaring security gaps which are totally not intentional in any way.
All these cameras appear to be the same basic hardware inside different enclosures, most supporting the same mobile app. Our favorite “exploit” for these cameras is the ability to put them into a pairing mode with the app, sometimes by pressing a public-facing button. Slightly more technically challenging would be accessing images from the app using the camera’s serial number, or finding file names being passed in plain text while sniffing network traffic. And that’s just the problems CR identified; who knows what else lurks under the covers? Some retailers have stopped offering these things, others have yet to, so buyer beware.
Speaking of our techno-dystopian surveillance state, if you’ve had it with the frustrations and expense of printers, has Hewlett-Packard got a deal for you. They want you to never own a printer again, preferring that you rent it from them instead. Their “All-In Plan” launched this week, which for $6.99 a month will set up up with an HP Envy inkjet printer, ink deliveries, and 24/7 tech support. It doesn’t appear that paper is included in the deal, so you’re on your own for that, but fear not — you won’t go through much since the entry-level plan only allows 20 prints per month. Plans scale up to 700 prints per month from an OfficeJet Pro for the low, low price of $36. The kicker, of course, is that your their printer has to be connected to the Internet, and HP can pretty much brick the thing anytime they want to. The terms of service also explicitly state that they’ll be sending your information to advertising partners, so that’ll be fun. This scheme hearkens back to the old pre-breakup days of AT&T, where you rented your phone from the phone company. That model made a lot more sense when the phone (probably) wasn’t listening in on everything you do. This just seems like asking for trouble.
It’s been a while since Ingenuity‘s final rough landing on Mars permanently grounded the overachieving helicopter, long enough that it’s time for the post-mortem analyses to begin. The first photographic evidence we had was a shadowgram from one of the helicopter’s navigational cameras, showing damage to at least one of the rotor tips, presumably from contact with the ground. Then we were treated to a long-distance shot from Ingenuity‘s rover buddy Perseverance, which trained its MASTCAM instruments on the crash zone and gave us a wide view of its lonely resting place.
Now, geovisual design student [Simeon Schmauβ] has taken long shots made with the rover’s SuperCam instrument and processed them into amazingly detailed closeups, which show just how extensive the damage really is. One rotor blade sheared clean off on contact, flying 15 meters before gouging a hole in the regolith. Another blade looks to be about half gone, while the remaining two blades show the damaged tips we’ve already seen. That the helicopter is still on its feet given the obvious violence of the crash is amazing, as well as an incredible piece of luck, since it means the craft’s solar panel is pointing in roughly the right direction to keep it powered up.
[Oskitone]’s Hardware Hustle is a printable roll-and-write tabletop game that can be played on a single sheet of paper. It simulates attempting to run a small hardware business sustainably. Buy parts, make products, and sell them without burning yourself out!
If you’re not familiar with roll-and-write games, it’s a genre in which players take turns by rolling dice and then choosing how to assign those values in a game space as they progress from turn to turn. In the case of Hardware Hustle, it’s primarily a resource management game in which a player will be purchasing parts, assembling widgets, selling those widgets, and improving processes all while managing both money and opportunity costs.
The inspiration for Hardware Hustle comes from [Oskitone]’s own experience designing, building, and selling things like open-sourced, hackable synth kits that are known for their thoughtful design and fantastic use of 3D printing.
The game is in open beta-testing mode, so if you’d like to give it a try, head over to the PDF download section of the GitHub repository. Don’t forget to share your thoughts with the feedback form after playing. (If you’re wondering why a printable tabletop game has source code on GitHub, it’s because the game’s printable sheets are generated by JavaScript, making adjustments and tweaks and version control easier.)
