Basic gestural control using a webcam
ZooBurst has been getting tons of use over the last few weeks, and I’ve been spending most of my free time making updates to the system and thinking of ways to move forward with the environment. It’s really amazing how fast it’s taken off – as of today we have over 1,000 people actively using the system to create their own 3D pop-up books!
There are a ton of features on my “to-do” list for ZooBurst, but one of the most pressing is to find a way to make the augmented reality feature more usable. Right now you can watch as your own books fly out of the printed symbol and into the world around you, but in order to interact with the book (i.e. turn the page, make a character speak) you still need to use the mouse.
ZooBurst augmented reality mode
I’ve toyed around with a number of potential interaction methods, including using the rotation of the marker to control various elements, but I’m not 100% happy with them just yet. I want to try and preserve the feeling of a real book as much as possible, and creating additional mappings that don’t necessarily apply to a physical book is something that I’d like to try and avoid.
One experiment I’ve been playing around with is the idea of using physical gestures to actually turn the pages of the book. I whipped up a quick 2D demo of this in action – basically I use motion detection in very small regions of the screen to create a matrix of “touchable” sensors. From there I can create a simple algorithm to interpret gestures based on the order in which these regions are activated. Here’s an example that allows you to simulate a coverflow-style interface with a series of images. I’m hoping to adapt this functionality into the 3D world of ZooBurst by the next release of its AR viewer component.
2D coverflow using a webcam