re long distance ir detection in article cstrockb apr csws cs sunysb edu cstrockb cs sunysb edu caleb strockbine writes could make for some interesting choreography light and sound could be controlled directly by the position of a dancer on stage or by the number of dancers on stage neat you could even build a spotlight that follows the dancer around on stage can you tell us more about what you re doing sounds like a very cool program tis only a gleam in my eye at this point i have yet to chose a tracking method the initial requirement was to design a system to locate a dancer in one of eight zones across the stage i did some experiments with pyroelectric detectors and found them difficult to align to get a definite zone transition and dancers stand still alot so their ir signature goes away the good thing about pryoelectrics is that their signal is proportional to the size of the warm body or body part and the velocity of said body this could be useful for detecting the intensity of a dance gesture dancers also really hate to wear little boxes and batteries strapped on their bodies but they really need to be emitting some kind of signal to be tracked the current toy i have been working with is a program called mandala for the amiga used with a live video digitizer this works with a video camera trained on the stage you can set thresholds for a zone within the field of view and an object brighter than the threshold will trigger an event events can be midi objects or sequences amiga sounds or graphic objects it s been fun to play with but the documentaion is arcane and the digitizer is noisy still it s very appealing the dancers don t have to wear any appliances you can have ots of zone s it speaks midi which can be used to control lights and i don t have to build any electronics it s all done with lighting and video brightness and contrast adjustments i have yet to do anything particularly useful or artistic but i have hopes
