What if life was like a comic book? Comic Kinect is an experiment in interactive art that utilizes Microsoft Kinect and OpenFrameworks to put people into a live-action classical action comic. Using the limb and body tracking technology available in the OpenNI library, Comic Kinect finds when one body ends, and another begins, all in three-dimensional space. When collisions occur, dramatic fighting comic text appears over the point of contact. Contour-finding along with saturation and mean-shift filtering provide for a cartoonish aesthetic.

As a member of the Comic Kinect team, I originally proposed and subsequently iterated on the design concept. My primary responsibility in the development phase was comic filtering effects in C++ using OpenCV. The Comic Kinect project proved to be a major success, amassing over 35,000 views on the original video post and appearing on kotaku.com and pcworld.com. The demo video was also featured by Johnny Lee, one of the original developers responsible for the Microsoft Kinect, as one of his favorite hacks. Microsoft also featured Comic Kinect in the promotion of next generation Kinect applications at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For more information about the creation of Comic Kinect, please see the official post and the demo video.