OS6Sense

First code commit! I've not used git before for source control (my programming over the last 5 years has been a solo effort so no need for anything beyond tarball source control) hence I just wanted to make some notes for myself on how to use it. Firstly, code is hosted on google at https://code.google.com/p/os6sense/. To check out a copy: git clone https://morphemass@code.google.com/p/os6sense/ os6sense There's very little there yet unless you are interested in just how badly python can be mangled. And for my own notes, to add a file, commit changes and update the repository : git add filename.ext git commit -m "Insert Comment" git push origin master I'll put together a download at some point in the future

My initial attempt at bolting all the bits together has run into a delay since I've decided to try and epoxy wield some parts together and don't have any suitable,  so yesterday my focus was on marker-less hand tracking. There are a lot of impressive videos on youtube showing hand-tracking when you throw in a moving background, varying lighting and a video stream that 99.999% of the time wont contain the object you want to track (but may contain 100000s of similar objects), well things don't tend to work as well as we would like. The last time I looked at hand tracking was probably 5 years ago and I wasn't too impressed by the reliability or robustness of the various techniques on offer and I cant say I'm any more impressed today. I recently had a quick look at various rapid approaches - touchless works but is marker based, TLD works but loses the target in long video and ends up learning a different target (but might be applicable if some form of re-initiali...

Its late here so I'm a brief post. As I've said, hardware wise there are a lot of options as to where to place the various components for a WGI and a few studies out there have looked at the various components in some depth (TODO refs). However an obvious constraint for this project is available resources (hardware, time, money etc) and when it comes to the act of physically assembling thing, and doing so quickly, for my first build it is almost a matter of just making the best out of things. Hence I present the rigging for O6Sense FG v0.01 which has been inspired by observing the trend towards the wearing of large closed-cup headphones and the opportunities this opens in having a "socially acceptable" wearable prototype. What is it? Its a pair of cheap headphones with the cups cut off and 2 Rode pop-shield mounts fitted into the rear wire loops. I cant help but feel some providence at work here since not only is the rear arm a snug fit the screw holes are the ex...

So continuing looking at cameras, firstly let me be clear I have a VERY limited budget for this project having already pushed out the boat to buy an Optoma PK301 (I'll cover pico-projectors at a later date) hence commercial options such as this HQ lens and pre-modded IR cameras are just out of my price bracket. Hence the PS3 camera is looking very tempting given they can be picked up on ebay for less than £15 and a large range of hacks have already been done for them. I wanted to document my comparison of the various options I have considered though : Name FOV (degrees) fps320 fps640 fps1280 Cost PS3 Eye 75/56 120 60 NA £15 C910 83H 1 60 60 30 £70 Kinect 58H (IR)/63H (RGB) 30 30 NA £100 Xtion 58H £120 Samsung SII 75??? ?? ?? 30 NA The above table is incomplete obviously ~ I've thrown in the SII since I have one available but I can't find any specifications on the camera, even from the datasheet hence the numbers are a guestimate based on a comparison with the ...

I made my first set of captures today - I'm not sure they are usable though since the act of role-playing the system use brought up a number of interesting issues : Worn Camera Position Mistry using Sixth Sense[1] An option in regards to the camera position is to simply place it in the same position as used by Mistry. However my concerns here are 2 fold: 1) Design rationale. There is no design rationale as to the placement of the camera.I don't mean an extended examination of the rationale, just a simple overview of the thinking behind the placement. 2) Ergonomics. I can't help but think how uncomfortable that position is going to be to use for protracted periods of time (gorilla arm effect) or after a long day. Also in that position what about people with a high BMI - isn't the camera angle going to be greater than 90 degrees? EDIT: Another couple of concerns in the back of my mind seem pertinent: 3) Social constraints. Having ones arms so far forwards is...

Just quickly throwing a recording app together yesterday I found that the video size wasn't being changed - a little digging suggests that the reliance on icv_SetPropertyCAM_V4L is always going to fail if the change in resolution between the width and height calls result in an unsupported resolution on the first call. Why isn't a simple call to set the video size with both height and width  parameters by exposing icvSetVideoSize supported? Its not my aim to patch opencv though, so for my purposes I've updated the values for DEFAULT_V4L_WIDTH and DEFAULT_V4L_HEIGHT in highgui/src/cap_v4l.cpp for 1280x720 and rebuilt. Yes its a fudge, and if I remember I'll have to bug it. But with that fixed I have a little recorder application ready to go with the only issue left to solved being, well, the usual fun games and open source politics. I get the following error when recording : Corrupt JPEG data: 1 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd0 Reading this http://forums.quickcamt...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20100199232.pdf I was somewhat surprised to come across a patent for Sixth Sense given the initial declaration that the code would be open sourced. I was even more surprised reading the contents of the patent at how general it is...oh hum lets not go there apart from to say I'm not a fan of broad patents, but I wanted to bring it up since 1) it is the only "detailed" source of information on the implementation of Sixth Sense and 2) its useful to acknowledge and recognised since I don't particularly want to be "trolled" in this research. So yes, its out there and its worth a quick skim through (or not since a "clean room" implementation might be advisable but too late for me!) since it tells us that the source for Sixth Sense is largely based on several open source projects (see 0120). Touchless is used for fiducial recognition, the $1 Unistroke Recogniser algorithm for gesture commands, and ARToolkit for the out...

Its been over two years since Pranav Mistry announced that his Sixth Sense project would be made open source. Since then we've heard little about this technology or the project and like many AR point technology research examples, this appears to have become abandonware. So when it came around for me to pick a topic for my Masters thesis I couldn't help but think it would be a great opportunity to do a design and build project for a similar system, investigating the HCI aspects of this novel technology as the focus...and that's what I'm doing. First though I need to build one and along the way I couldn't help but think 2 things : 1) This is also a good opportunity to build my first open source project so that, if other researchers want to explore this technology, an artefact exists allowing for rapid development of a research system. 2) There's also an opportunity to examine an interesting concept of "The Inventor as the User" as a UCD perspecti...