Pressure Project 2 (Nick)
Posted: March 2, 2021 Filed under: Nick Romanowski, Pressure Project 2 Leave a comment »I remember hearing about the LEAP motion when it was originally posted on KickStarter. One of the things that I was initially interested in was the idea of interacting with objects in virtual, 3D space. That’s the direction I head with this pressure project as I attempted to build a sort of 3D interaction interface.
I began going about this by first creating a way to visualize hands in the scene, knowing that this had to be handed off to someone I thought that forcing them to launch the LEAP visualizer would bee sort of clunky. I instead used the x and y values from each hand to generate hold values that I changed with a limit scale and fed into projectors on some images of sprite hands I found online. I used rutt etra to rotate them as well, grabbing the roll value from the LEAP and feeding it into that actor.
I spent a lot of time building some clunky logic gates to help make my interactions more intuitive. I wanted it to be so that if you made a circle with a finger one way, it zoomed in, but if you did it the other, it zoomed out. That required quite a bit of playing around with until I devised a system that always let the “circle” trigger through but changed whether it was adding or subtraction from the total zoom based on whether the direction was pumping out a 1 or 2. I then used a similar system to do the same thing for swiping to rotate. All of that data was plugged into a 3D player that was set to a Render which was plugged into a projector. Again, with passing this to someone else in mind, I added some quick instructions that hold on the screen until both hands are present.
Figuring out the logic gates and the 3D were probably the most difficult portions of this pressure project. In the future I think I will go with Alex’s suggestion which is to just build my logic in a javascript actor to save the trouble of using 10+ logic-esque actors passing values back and forth. I’m happy I at least got a taste of 3D as I’d like to pursue working with it further in my final project. Rutt etra was also interesting to play with as it seems to be able to take traditionally 2D objects and add a Z-axis to them, which I think will also be helpful in my final project.