Adding to the list of homebrewed Kinect wonders, artist Mauritius Seeger writes to share his live video scratching rig, built with Kinect. It’s the first experiment, but already shows some great promise:
hey guys, i just wanted to let you know about a kinect prototype/hack i’ve made to explore video scratching via hand movements. just a first step in a possible gestural VJ interface. in this video you see me controlling the playhead of a video using the distance between my body and the camera. currently it just picks a significant closest point, so that it can be used with either hand, head or body yet remaining robust to noise and outliers and not re-quiting calibration or background subtraction.
But wait a second here – is this just about novelty, about using Kinect Because It’s There? There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I wanted to know what VJ drmo’s motivation drove him to create the project. After all, the answer to the question “why” is likely to be different for each artist, inspiring some to embrace something like Kinect while giving someone else new-found appreciation for good, old-fashioned knobs and faders.
His personal answer is well thought-out:
i use modul8 with a midi controller and have kind of given up on video scratching because it’s so bad in software when i last tried it ( with modul8) and have been generally frustrated with the type of control i have over video playback in vj software.
the reason i was interested in using kinect for this is because i can imagine a much more intuitive, natural and fun way to control visuals than sliders or a mouse. i was going to add clip transition controlled with a swipe movement, since scratching and clip changing would go a long way in having something usable already, and that would just be the beginning.
So, dear readers, what control scheme do you dream of?