Welcome back! I’ve been thinking about the proper next steps to take for a while now. I keep seeing all these TouchDesigner compositions that feature hand tracking through a webcam using the MediaPipe plugin. It’s open-source and easy to set up for basic stuff. But since I use Unity, I wanted to see if there’s a MediaPipe port I can use in there. There is, but it does not support my GPU yet. So I popped my cherry and finally installed TouchDesigner. I’m hyped baby!
I followed a tutorial by the TD Wizard himself Torin Blankensmith. Foremost in my mind was whether or not this plugin can recognize more than 2 hands. It cannot. Big bummer.
I did some googling and found Google’s official Hand Landmark Detection Guide. According to that doc, num_hands can be any integer ≥ 1. I played with their Python Collab notebook demo and proved this to be true using an image I found online.
Since the TouchDesigner plugin is open source, I figured its creators wouldn’t mind if I bugged them about my dilemma. I subscribed to Torin’s Patreon and left a comment on his most recent MediaPipe post asking about increasing the amount of hands supported. I also reached out to Dom Scott, who conveniently has a question contact form on his personal website. Hopefully, either of them write me back soon.
Before I got too sidetracked in the new shiny world of TouchDesigner, I decided to go ahead and finally open source the two iterations of the Energy Ball that I’ve already demoed. About dang time! I know I said I’d release a course on building the project from scratch instead of directly open-sourcing the code, but screw that—I only have so much time and a course is only as good as the end result it promises, and this project is far from over! Here are the repos for V1 and V2.
Whoof. This has been an unexpectedly long dev bender and I now find myself moving this blog into Obsidian fully in order to avoid having to pay $10 a month for Notion premium. Based on my research, Quartz or Hugo seem to be the way to go. Since I’m more comfortable in Node than in Go (how the times have changed… I literally built a frontend for an app in Hugo ~3 years ago), I’m trying out Quartz first. It was a pretty easy setup, but I’ll need to do some thinking and figure out how I’d like to map out my blog. Do I want this specific Dev Log to be the only content on my revised jossgitlin.com website? Probably not. Therefore, it’s time for me to log off and let this new plan sort itself out in my subconscious mind.
I’ll leave you, nonexistent reader, with this screenshot of my initial Quartz setup.
Tags: gamedev unity vfx mediapipe hand-tracking touchdesigner opensource