A project by Hélène and Haoran
What is Face tracking kaleidoscope?
It's a dynamic kaleidoscope that you can control the parameter of it by moving your face and smiling.
The original idea
We wanted to make a project combining kaleidoscope with webcam. So we starting looking for the examples of kaleidoscope and video. To make it more fun and interactive, we were thinking it would be better, if the users could be able to interact with it using their face! Yes, we know, funny crazy idea.
How does it work?
This project was developed upon the kaleidoscope demo made by Felipe Cuadra. With the help of opencv we can use the webcam to track user's face movement and expressions. So the user could change the parameter that mouse provides by moving their face. You can see a white dot in the middle of face model on left top corner of the screen, that is the moving reference of the face. And then we send the parameter to kaleidoscope. And once the user smiles, it represents the click on the mouse, so it leaves a bright spot on where the mouse is.
Final thoughts
Quite interestingly, we found that when we were trying to test it or when users tried to use it, in order to let the face-tracking smile click function work we always put this exaggerating smile on. It seems that we deal with new technology almost the same way we've been dealing with human babies.