FilmGate reached out last week to see if I was working on anything new. Outside of work, I haven’t been, but I told ‘em I had something cooking. At the very least, it’s time for me to make a new, better version of the energy ball.
In my last post, I asked if you believe in destiny. Well, today, after months of ignoring this project, I go on my GitHub and see a guy starred my EnergyBall V2 repo. I check out his profile and on the very first repo I click on, find this ↓ ….HOW THE F#%K?!! I need to reach out and see if he’s down to jam. At the very least, I NEED that awesome lightning shader.
I’ve been wanting to move away from the Kinect and toward webcam-based tracking, but I think that just isn’t realistic yet. At the end of the day, simply having a live video overlay will be an upgrade. I should go for the lower-hanging fruit of just mounting a webcam on top of my Kinect and then displaying the Unity output above that camera feed, or the even lower hanging fruit of just enabling the camera output from my Kinect in Unity. Either way, you know I had to give the Sports2D package a try.
I tried bringing my laptop over to my dad and getting the program to recognize 2 pairs of hands, but that didn’t seem to work. Was the package broken, or did I just not have enough lighting in my dad’s room for my crappy webcam?
I decided to be diligent and test run a stock video, and it correctly detected everything, which means that I just need to get a better camera. I have a Sony A5000 mirrorless I can stream to my PC, but the setup is cumbersome.
I gave it a trickier test (more motion and a third person) and it still tracked fine.
All this to say, hand tracking works well, but how easily will I be able to sync the data to my Unity scene? This is what I have to explore next.