When you first read the headline you were probably thinking this was some kind of joke, but it’s actually quite a serious endeavor.
Chris O’Shea first began experimenting a stereo camera back in 2007 in an effort to produce a software system that could track the movements of a person playing air guitar.
His first attempts weren’t really up to the standard he was looking for, but now thanks to Xbox Kinect he has turned out something that looks like it’ll develop into lot of fun.
Here’s the basics on how it works:
First it thresholds the scene to find a person, then uses a histogram to get the most likely depth of a person in the scene. Then any pixels closer than the person to the camera are possible hands. It also uses contour extremity finding on the person blob to look for hands in situations where your hand is at the same depth as your body. It only works if you are facing the camera front on. Then it uses one hand as the neck of the guitar, drawing a virtual line from the neck through the person centroid to create the guitar line. The other hand is tracked to see if it passes through this line, strumming the guitar. The neck hand position controls the chord.
If you’d like to know more visit Chris at www.chrisoshea.org/lab/air-guitar-prototype