Show HN: Let your body be the gamepad using a webcam | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Let your body be the gamepad using a webcam

github.com

14 pointshypernovawebant7 comments

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

[2]: https://github.com/mristin/cactusss-desktop

[3]: https://github.com/mristin/ski-leu-desktop/

[4]: https://github.com/everythingishacked/Semaphore

Edit: clarified title; layout of references

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This also works well if you want to practice dribbling in basketball, just tested it this morning: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/mristin/body-gamep...

This 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.

You 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.

Thanks, changed!

I 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.

So Xbox Kinect? Just joking, very impressive.

XBox 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.

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