Drawing with color

Here’s our emulation attempt at letting people draw on their screens – temporarily. The patch is included in the last part of the video.

Our inspiration came from :

The video documents an Interactive Art Installation by students studying Medialogy in Aalborg University. In this course, students study the technology behind design in film, games and animation. They used a color tracking patch to create a little interaction where users can shoot particles and interact with them.

We emulated the color tracking example in the video for our project, and built on it. Instead of having users shoot particles, we used the color tracker to enable them to draw on the screen with any bright object within reach.

By adjusting the tolerance level and selecting a color, one can draw over their screen using any object with a high contrast color.

This is an example:

We pulled the tracked object’s coordinates from jit.findbounds and produced the drawing effect in jit.lcd. We blended the two matrices with jit.alphablend.

We tried various objects before settling on a light. Preliminary trials revealed that lighting played a big role in how well the tracker was able to detect the object. After experiments with everything from a water bottle to eyelash glue, we found that an object with a light source produced the most stable results.

By Su Hui & Jazlyn