1. Final Presentation
"Flappy shadow" is a project by Kai Hung and Tong Wu that allows users to create and fly a virtual bird from shadow puppets.
2. Idea Development
Kai is mainly responsible for designing visuals for the project. We went through several versions of designs and finally decided the design of the virtual bird should fly over a black background and mimic the hand gesture for shadow bird. I focuses on the coding part of the project. Originally we decided to use a leap motion combined with wakinator to detect and differentiate users’ hand gesture. But then we found out the detection range was so limited, that severely influenced the engagement and the interaction of uses. So we finally decided to use Kinect and kinectron combined with p5.js to achieve expected outcome. Kinect does an exllecent job in tracking user's hands positions, but its sensitivity also gives us trouble given the show environment was very dark and crowded. Although we have programmed the Kinect to track only the closest body’s hand position, it is still easily interrupted when people are all crowded in one small room.
4. System diagram
