Technabob » image manipulation

Kinect Hack Du Jour: Body Morphin’

Technabob — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 04:45:45 +0000

It seems as if the hacking possibilities for the Xbox 360 Kinect just keep expanding. Today’s hack? How about a way to map your body into a real-time 3D image, then distort it.

Robert Hodgin of Flight404 has been playing with his Kinect sensor along with Cinder, an open-source C++ library for creative projects, along with a Kinect Cinder Block module. In his examples, he manages to take a real-time 3D image of his body, then distorts it to look like a balloon man. Or a guy with a horribly disfiguring disease. Either way, it’s way cool…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

And watch what happens when Robert puts his cat through his body distortion algorithm…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Damn, that’s one puffy cat. While my previous favorite Kinect hack was Yankeyan’s Kinect lightsaber, I have to say this one currently takes the cake, especially with all the graphical possibilities of the Kinect + Cinder. What would you do with your Kinect if you could hack it to do anything you wanted?

[via Cartoon Brew]

Diminished Reality: Now You See It and You Also Don’T

Lambert Varias — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:30:38 +0000

A couple of students at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany are developing the video equivalent of the Content-Aware Fill feature in Photoshop CS5. In other words, their software can make objects invisible, and it does this in real-time.

Watch the video to see how Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll’s image synthesizer achieves diminished reality:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It’s not totally seamless – not yet anyway – and if you noticed, they used mostly uniform backgrounds in their demo, but the effect is still jaw-dropping. The program is currently Windows only, but Herling and Broll are working on an Android version. Engadget surmises that the app will be free for non-commercial use.

[Ilmenau University (DE) via Engadget]

World’S Biggest and Best Tetris Game is Also Sadly Fake

Alisha K. — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:06:05 +0000

Swedish artist Erik Johansson has both delighted and disappointed me today. His digital art and image manipulation is top notch, and anything influenced by Tetris is of course awesome. But as great as this piece is, it’s terribly sad, because I cannot play giant Tetris.

This is just begging for someone to make a flash game for this concept: using a crane to manipulate giant tetrominoes in order to build something. Or take another cue from Johansson and cook up a game based on playing Tic-Tac-Toe in an unfinished road. Yes, in, not on.

Classic games are perfect for these kinds of digital art. I’d hate to see what this guy could do with something like Call of Duty….

[Albotas via Super Punch]