I’ve been researching bits & pieces of inexpensive tech for art installations that bridge the physical/digital gap in interesting ways. In particular I’m developing tangible music ideas (moving beyond touchscreens and pixels) and integrating vision / motion capture into my realtime gfx stuff. Figure I’ll share some interesting building blocks. First, I recommend the great RFID visualization experiments and process writeups over at BERG and nearfield.org. The reader and tags are reasonably priced if you want to try.
Personally I’m into capacitance sensing for making touch-responsive objects. Here’s a technical article for beginners. If you’ve got an Arduino it’s one of the simplest circuits to build: a resistor, capacitor and, um, any piece of metal. The CapSense library‘s a great intro. Getting more advanced, the MPR121‘s a tiny, inexpensive chip that handles 12-channel touch for you. I’ve got one coming in the mail and am looking forward to tinkering. With multiple sensors you run into interference problems, but I found a neat paper on fighting these effects. (Love this spread-spectrum sensor but it’s waay more advanced to build.)
I liked this post at CDM on using the Kinect as an OSC music & video controller, lots of good starting points there. Another one shows live VJing with one using OpenFrameworks and TUIO. The NITE skeleton tracking component is available for OSX, as is the OSCeleton code. Kimchi and Chips have videos showing the promise of motion tracking + projection mapping.
