Study 5! This one is the evolution of our Study 4 patch, we tweaked most parts of our patch (e.g: sensitivity values) in order to make it work a bit closer to how we wanted it to, and also added some new features we thought of after presenting the original.

One of the new features is the addition of music! Now, when the patch plays back the recording of the user moving around, it plays Frolic by Luciano Michelini (more commonly known as the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme!). Hopefully, this will make people laugh, but also to draw the attention of anyone nearby.

We also added a keying system for the background that works similarly to Apple’s Photo Booth or Sony’s EyeToy games. It asks the user to step out of frame takes a photo of the background, it then runs the image and the webcam’s live feed through an absolute difference operator to create an alpha channel, which is then packed into the webcams video feed. This means the video can be overlayed onto anything using a jit.alphablend object. We chose to use the ‘chickens’ clip that is included with Max.

I really enjoyed working as a group for Studies 4 & 5, we were able to work together on different parts of the patch. As an example, during one class, Isobel made all of the graphics while I worked on implementing them in the patch. I’m looking forward to more collaborations in the future.

Download the Max Patch here.