Aight, so I’m going to go back in time to when I started working on our tracking system. The year is 1923, alcohol is illegal. That must have sucked. Fast forward to 2008. I had a decent tracking system working using color tracking with the JMyron library for processing, a webcam, and glow sticks but decided that it wasn’t reliable enough because the tracking system kept loosing the points. The distance and angle of the glow stick changed the color that the webcam was seeing.

Infrared seemed like the next logical step. Communication with another team working on New Media Team Project lead to the use of another processing library. Wrj4P5 grabs the image from the infrared camera in a wiimote and tracks ir points in a processing sketch. Combining this with the work I had already done with JMyron resulted in a prototype that was used in a presentation.

What next? Make it work better. I was running into trouble with the wiimote swapping points causing the paddle to flip. I spent some time devising a system that could tell point A from point B. The wiimote assigns the points to an array based on the x and y values of the point starting from the top left corner, so I wrote a class that each paddle end could be assigned to. This class keeps track of its last known point and goes through the wiimote IR points array and its current point is assigned to which ever point is closest to its last point. This seemed to have fixed the flipping problem for the most part. But there was still some funny business going on.

When you point the wands away from the wiimote the sketch loses the point and when it comes back it likes to flip. You can’t expect the user to be aware of pointing the wand directly at the wiimote. I added some more if statements that check how far the new point is from both ends of the paddle and a boolean that checks if the points array is less then two and thats were we are today, ever closer to a perfected tracking system.

There are still more bugs to be fixed. I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to my development, especially when I’m working on something that I am excited about and interested in doing. I will continue to tweak the tracking engine in my spare time until I feel that its done.