Not too much progress this week as I was out of town for a convention, but we did manage to make some headway with the tech aspects of the piece.
I met with a friend and we did some preliminary tests with the kinect in Touchdesigner and identified a key issue with our current setup: The kinect considers anything touching our bodies to be a part of our bodies. This makes is hard to create a projection mask since the floor's surface is included in our corporal data. However, through some trial an error, we found that tweaking the depth threshold helps to remove some of the floor's data. Even so, the system is still a bit wonky, but with more R&D we should be on our way.
I also met with my engineers and tasked them with learning Touchdesigner and they've been making incredible progress! Thanks to Arvind, we've got a rough skeleton setup that mirrors a person's movements. Our next steps are to clean up the skeletal system and parent primitive geometry to its bones. We'll be using this method to track animated elements onto each body part. The end goal is to composite these tracked animated elements on top of backgrounds mapped to the body's silhouette.
That's it for this week! More to come soon! :)