Kinect Particles

A small interactive installation from one of my master classes. Sadly it was never exhibited because the event was cancelled, but I still want to document it.

It’s a floor projection of a particle simulation that reacts to people moving over it, built entirely in TouchDesigner. We first tried blob tracking on infrared camera footage, but it was too noisy and hard to map to particle space. Since we were already using a Kinect for the infrared, we switched to its depth texture, which solved it. The simulation is based on a Patreon solution one of our professors provided.

The main video shows the final setup: depth texture plus blob tracking, with the blob positions pushing the particles. In the real installation only the particles would be visible. I only have dev footage, but have a look anyway ;)