So for the final assignment I decided to do alittle bit of research before diving straight in and thought that I would just search for “colour tracker MAX/MSP” on youtube. I found a handy tutorial that taught me how colour tracking basically works through the webcam and how it translates to the LCD player.

I made my own custom laser pointer by playing with how black would make a mask for the green “pointer” I’d be using.

I didn’t like it very much. It only drew rectangles that would be cleared(because I put clear infront of the message) but Margaret gave me the suggestion of using paintoval which was brilliant because now I realized I should’ve just went over to the LCD references.

I also didn’t like how it would just write and stay there so I decided to use what I’ve learnt during class and apply a jit.op @op * @val 0.999 that would hopefully give a slow fading effect because the opacity of the object would slowly fade into nothingness of the black. But it didn’t work.

From some googling I realized I should use jit.matrix memory and viola it magically worked. Lastly, I called for a jit.alphablend to see where I was drawing and that wasn’t too difficult for me. The end result is the video above.

This exercise was very effective as it helped me stretch my MAX head by implementing whatever I’ve learnt practically about the MAX to achieve the solution for the project without much hand holding. Thanks LPD!