4 ms·
Show HN: Let your body be the gamepad using a webcam
Hi HN,
I made a keyboard emulator that tracks your body pose and emits the key presses accordingly.
My main motivation was to make my kids move more on rainy days. I already made a couple of mini-games using the body pose [1-3], and those were definitely fun to make and play! However, once the kids learned the tricks, they got bored. I could only produce that much content myself, and soon realized that I lack time for churning out games.
Finally, I decided to tap into an endless pool of PC games, preferrably simple and less addictive ones like the Gameboy and DOS games.
This project has been also inspired by [4], which has been featured on HN recently.
[1]: https://github.com/mristin/pop-that-balloon-desktop https://github.com/mristin/pop-that-balloon-desktop
[2]: https://github.com/mristin/cactusss-desktop https://github.com/mristin/cactusss-desktop
[3]: https://github.com/mristin/ski-leu-desktop/ https://github.com/mristin/ski-leu-desktop/
[4]: https://github.com/everythingishacked/Semaphore https://github.com/everythingishacked/Semaphore
Edit: clarified title; layout of references
- qbrass 3y agoYou should add "using a webcam" when describing it. It's one of those things that seems too obvious for you to mention since you made it, but isn't apparent to everyone else.
- hypernovawebant 3y agoThanks, changed!
- joshmn 3y agoThis reminds me of the game I played on the family Compaq Presario back in the day. I think it shipped with the Logitech eyeball webcam. Volleyball or something — you'd hit the ball with your body, as intersected from the webcam capture. 8-year-old me thought it was the coolest thing.
- sudovert 3y agoSo Xbox Kinect? Just joking, very impressive.
- mristin 3y agoXBox doesn't work outside & in the class room. Now, I wouldn't advocate for playing computer games outside -- but this might be a nice gimmick for children's birthdays when celebrated in the garden. A friend of mine uses these games in the classroom as a primary school teacher. Kids here all have a laptop, so when they get nervous, it's a neat way for them to make a break & move a bit. Apparently, this works well for kids with hyperactive tendencies. Kinect would be too complicated in that setting as you need to purchase & maintain 20+ Kinects.
- hypernovawebant 3y agoThis also works well if you want to practice dribbling in basketball, just tested it this morning: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/mristin/body-gamepad/main/ski-or-die.gif https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/mristin/body-gamep...
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoI too recall the Eye Toy. It was better as a webcam on my PC than it was connected to my PS2, at least until microsoft killed it by requiring signed drivers.