WebCam Whiteboard

[Narendra Sisodiya]

Hi, I saw following website - http://www.webcam-whiteboard.com/
This guy is using IR Camera which is directly connected to PC instead
of WIImote
It is low cost design..
What you think, about disadvantage and advantage.
Also, I am trying to build this kind of setup..
I can think that whenever I am moving the IR pen, cursor will be
move.. I am able to do this task but how i can send click event.. how
Wiimote do this things, I saw couple of videos which has Wiimote and
IR pen. If IR pen send continuous IR rays then we can generate
movemove events.. how these demos work.. ??
AFAIK - WIImote receive only IR rays.. so how a normal IR pen behave
like a normal cursor - mousemove & click

One way which come in my mind is that whenever IR is detected, just
generate "mousedown" event.. and when IR rays is disconnected ,
generate mousedown event.. So it will be just IR-left-click.. and not
mousemove.. click to move mouse..

I am doing this by IR camera so that I can produce cheaper products..
I am detecting IR rays and points from frame-by-frame. I am doing it
in Python. my command line version is ready..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaqtnFZlkOg
I will upload more videos after success..
Also I need improvement suggestion.

Thanks

[matt ledding]

Hi Narendra,

Looks like fun!

Pere Negre has an open source python whiteboard which might have some good code to look at... it is a great program and actively developed by some very good minds.    

The wiimoteproject site has all sorts of ideas as well that might be interesting.  One idea for clicking is a long IR click... like on mobile phones.  

Also, Brian Peek had a chapter on wiimote whiteboards in his "coding for fun" book that should give some ideas for smoothing algorithms and under the hood stuff even if it isn't in python.

Wiimote cuts up the co-ordinates (while scanning at 100 hz) for you so the cpu processing costs for a cheap web cam might not be worth the savings.  The wiimote runs great on cheap netbooks, so the overall savings from avoiding Computer Vision might be higher.  Otherwise, maybe look at the NUI group stuff for CV because there is some great stuff there. the python forum is here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewforum/65/ 

cheers,

Matt

[Narendra Sisodiya]

Thanks Matt for your kind suggestion !

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