I’ve been working on a project for my Italian renaissance art class for the past few days, which not surprisingly considering my interests, involves a computer, Wiimote, funny sunglasses, and some infrared LEDs. I’m trying to recreate an early Italian renaissance painting (from the likes of Fra Angelico or Piero Della Francesca) with a new spatial component - parallax. The Italian virtuoso painters made great strides towards perfect spatial representation, but were limited to a two dimensional picture-plane - something that can be solved with some cool electronics. I’m sure Brunelleschi would have loved this stuff.
The idea is simple, and is based on the work done by Johnny Chung Lee with Wiimote head tracking. With a stationary Wiimote and two LEDs mounted on the side of a pair of cheap sunglasses, Johnny’s software can calculate the ‘position’ of your head and from that derive a projection matrix. I plan to cut out pieces of paintings and offset them along the z-axis, hopefully producing some nice 3D effects when the viewer moves his or her head around.
For those of you out there wanting to try this Wiimote head tracking thing, I’ll warn you that I ran into some technical difficulties before I actually got it to work. First, getting the Macbook Pro bluetooth card to play nice with the Wiimote under XP is neigh on impossible. Secondly, the bluetooth drivers and software everybody seems to be using for this sort of thing, a horrid bundle of trash called Bluesoleil, doesn’t work either. After beating my head against this stuff for a little while, I went to Best Buy and picked up a Kensington USB bluetooth adapter for about $30.00. I followed the steps in this tutorial and got it to work (actually, I lost another several hours because the damn Wiimote was out of batteries and I didn’t know it - thanks Dave). I haven’t finished putting together the infrared shades yet, so I used two candles (candle flame emits infrared light, conveniently) placed about 10 centimeters apart to approximate a Wii sensor bar. I would not recommend putting this on your head.
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