Exploring real-time video interactivity with Scratch

Real-time video interactivity is becoming increasingly popular in today's world with the advent of better and more affordable video input devices. With the recent release of the Microsoft Kinect followed by an official Kinect SDK, there has been an explosion of activity around utilizing this now easily-accessible video sensor data. Many creative uses have surfaced including object recognition, gesture recognition, and more. The audience capable of taking full advantage of these video technologies continues to be a technical crowd, likely with a background in computer science. But what if such video technology were made accessible to a much more diverse crowd? This thesis presents a set of computer vision tools for exploration of the real-time video interactivity space in the context of Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), a graphical block-based programming language accessible to all ages. To decide what functionality to provide to Scratch users, various computer vision algorithms are tested, including object detection, object recognition, face recognition and optical flow. Ultimately, an optical flow implementation is realized and its generative abilities are observed through testing with different user groups.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Hwang, Ting-Hsiang Tony

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mitchel Resnick.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77018

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/77018