paranoid blog

15 Responses to “iSightMaster - Progress”

1. Simon // Sep 8, 2008 at 10:25 pm

   This is incredibly exciting!

   I can’t wait for the next release, and the exciting applications found for this piece of magic.

2. Roger // Sep 22, 2008 at 8:56 pm

   Hello Andreas,

   When will your OpenCV version be available?

   Have you considered open sourcing your project?

   Thanks

3. admin // Sep 26, 2008 at 8:26 pm

   Hi Roger,

   actually I don’t know when it will be available. It is still a bit buggy and needs some fine tuning as well as a better haarcascade for hand recognition.

   Since I am heavily relying on other people’s work/research, it will most probably become an open source project.

   Thanks for the interest,
   Andreas

4. Dan // Dec 4, 2008 at 12:28 pm

   Hey Andreas,

   Just wanting to know if the next release will be storing the actions you set so there is no need to re-type them in every time?

   P.S

   Love the program man, very cool, keep up the good work.

5. admin // Dec 4, 2008 at 6:55 pm

   Hey Dan,

   great to hear that you like the program. Your suggestion is already planned for the next release. I am, however, very busy these days with other things, so I guess that it will take some time until I can release a new version.

   Andreas

6. Rodger // Dec 24, 2008 at 11:06 pm

   Hey! can you post the new version (and its code) for debuggers to use? I’d really like to try it out, buggy or not. Self-calibration would be a great feature.

7. admin // Jan 5, 2009 at 6:02 pm

   @Rodger

   I will try to post it as soon as possible. I will have to sort out some licensing issues first, though.

8. J // Jan 9, 2009 at 8:15 pm

   I like your project. Recently at CES there was an announcement of controlling a television with hand controls. Your software made me think of that. Wouldn’t it be nice to implement your software so that one could use it to control e.g. Eyetv? One could hide a webcam close to their television, hooked up to a mac, and have a hand-controllable tv.

9. admin // Jan 10, 2009 at 1:44 pm

   That definitely is one possible application, which I haven’t thought of yet.

   I think it should be fairly easy to implement it, as long as EyeTV can be controlled via AppleScript or something like that.

10. Simon George // Jul 14, 2009 at 11:43 pm

    I love the previous version, and this one looks like it is shaping up very well.

    First Suggestion: I expect this would be quite hard, but this app may be better as a system preference pane. Or perhaps running in the menu bar. Then it would be out of your way.

    Second: Have you tried FluidTunes (google it)? I ask because I think I would use iSightMaster allot for expose, a left swipe for trigger, but then what? You need some way to choose one of your “exposed” apps. Having a faint video feed overlaid on top of Expose could allow you to do the tap select thing like in FluidTunes. I feel this would be a very fluid and intuitive way of triggering and using Expose - Swipe left with hand, air tap the app you want. But it is probably a too difficult pipe dream.

    Keep up the great work, I cant wait for the next release!

11. admin // Jul 25, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    Simon,

    thank you very much for your comments, I very much appreaciate any suggestions and ideas that are interesting to implement. Don’t hesitate to write if you have any other intersting ideas!

12. JG // Jan 23, 2010 at 5:07 pm

    So, how is progress going? I was looking into hand gesture again today, and to my surprise very little has been happening since the introduction of the iSight in Macs. Your software looks the most like what I’m looking for. I would like to integrate it in home automation. Making it activate a touchscreen through a gesture, and deactivating the screen again with another gesture.
    So I’m very curious to hear if you made any new progress?

13. admin // Jan 26, 2010 at 1:13 am

    JG,

    I am currently making some changes to computer vision part of the project, which will hopefully lead to some promising results (regarding robustness, ease of use, etc.). There are, however, some problems that are quite difficult to tackle which are related to different lighting and the auto-exposure feature of the builtin isight. Since my goal is to create a tool that requires little to no calibration and is usable by the average user, I suspect that I will have to put in quite a lot of more work.

    Anyways, given a static background and good lighting, my current development version is able to analyze the shape of a hand, counting fingers and recognizing a pinch gesture.

    Originally, I planned to use a Viola-Jones classifier for object recognition, but the training seems to be a kind of black art requiring lots of sample images, which I was too lazy too acquire…

    Neverthess, it is great to hear that people are interested in this stuff. If you have any ideas for possible applications, don’t hesitate to leave a message.

    bye,
    Andreas

14. Dan. K // May 4, 2010 at 10:41 am

    Hey Andreas, I think you have a great thing going here and i’m sure that people would pay quite a lot for this program when finished, although if your not planning on making a disk version of it you might want to consider it.

    p.s. if you were to make it a free download i would praise you as a god.

15. admin // May 4, 2010 at 11:54 pm

    Dan, iSightMaster is now called iPinchMe and available as a free download on this site.