The “Effervo” Kinect Particle Effect Machine

Here’s a new hack for the Xbox Kinect called “Effervo”. It’s a really cool effect built using Openframeworks. The Kinect is setup in front of the user and the projector puts an image in front of the user’s screen. Three dimensional data about the person and his or her movements is captured using Microsoft’s sensor. As it is described, the Effervo program “uses simple iterative rules to govern its movement and gives the impression of swarm like behavior.” This may not be a “Haloween Hack”, but we could definitely see something similar used in a haunted house. Maybe it could use blood droplets instead of particles?

Maybe this hack will inspire other people to follow in [Jayson’s] footsteps. He describes himself as a “programmer turned artist.” We’d like to think that all engineering and programming work is a form of art, but the video of this piece in action after the break is especially eye-catching.

10 thoughts on “The “Effervo” Kinect Particle Effect Machine

  1. Why don’t they write a software that would extrapolate the shape of the person’s back?

    Kinda like facial recognition, a program would indentify the object as a person, and would then apply some sort of a prototype model to estimate the full solid instead of just the front surface.

  2. It’s neat, but fundamentally (look closely) the time when it’s ‘him’ is just what looks like a simple brightness-level mask onto a mostly stationary background of particles. You can see it especially when he moves, it’s clearly just a mask.

    The times when it breaks up are pretty standard particle generator outputs, and not flocking or swarming behavior at all.

    If he moved his hands and the particles spread out and flew back together, that would be some sort of flocking type behavior.

    (and would be all sorts of awesome.)

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