Week 9: November 8th, 2022
CREATE • BODY
The idea this week is to center an experience around the body--yours, someone else's, or a specific audience. Choose the tools and techniques that make the most sense for the concept, keeping in mind that body point estimation extends choices for interactive design beyond the mouse and keyboard, which prioritize the hands and fingers for communication and expression in a very specific way. Some questions to start brainstorming:
What are the private, public, and performative aspects of bodies?
How are bodies imagined, idealized, reflected, altered?
What is the personal and cultural significance of masks for ritual, to explore identity, hide, entertain, frighten...
In whay ways can you use the body for expressive input? Consider choices for the part(s), position, direction of movement, and speed.
For this sketch, I wanted to use hand gestures that my dog knows. I focused on three gestures. One is like a checkmark, where the pointed index and thumb with all other fingers closed. Seeing this gesture, my dog rests his chin on my fingers. Another gesture is making an “ok” sign of sorts with the index and thumb touching and all other fingers outstretched for my dog to put his snout in the circle. The last gesture is an open palm, which asks for my dog’s paw.
In my first approach, I followed along Teachable Machine 1: Image Classification by The Coding Train and made an image classification model using Google’s Teachable Machine platform that involves tensor flow.
However, after running into some issues, I switched over to only using ml5.js’s Hand Pose model in my second approach.
Below are the details of my creation process rather chronologically with organization into different sections.