Jorge C. S. Cardoso, DEI, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade de Coimbra Rua Sílvio Lima, Univ.
Coimbra - Pólo II, 3030-790 Coimbra Portugal
Face projection mapping for Festival IN
23 Nov 2013The School of Arts was present at the Festival IN in Lisbon, last week. Besides having a regular stand, our school participated with various interactive projects. One of those projects was a giant projection made from the faces of the visitors.
The installation
The installation has two main points: one in which a computer detects and takes a screenshot of your face (and creates a depth map), and another where the recorded faces are projected onto a giant sculpture. Figure 1 shows one early sketch depicting the general interaction process.
We wanted to project, not just a photo of the person, but rather some representations of the face, including a 3D model, a Voronoi representation, and some simple blurred images. In Figure 2, you can see a photo of how the final setup of installed at Festival IN, including one of the representations that appear on the large scale projection - a 3D model of the captured face.
Interaction
Interaction with this installation is pretty simple since you only need to stand in front of the kiosk. Figure 3 shows a first sketch of the details for the interaction.
The system only takes a screenshot of your face if you get at a certain distance from the kiosk. This ensures that people are not caught off-guard, and it also allowed us to get better framed face pictures. The final system included an extra cue to help users get at the current distance to the kiosk. This is shown in Figure 4.
Implementation
The installation uses a Kinect for getting and RGB image as well as the depth data that is used to create the 3D model of the face. It is also used to determine the distance at which a person is standing in front of the kiosk. It is all done in Processing using toxiclibs for the 3D models and Voronoi generation.