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Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

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Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#62

Author here! Pleasant surprise to find my project at the top of HN this morning with such positive feedback :) I'm happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions for future tweaks. Planning to make this into a customizable full-body game controller as well.

I thought it was awesome. It occurred to me when you mentioned tinkering with magic values that it won't be very tweekable for other users like that. Instead of MediaPipe try training a simple NN with a quickstart asking new players to assume the positions for fine tuning? :P

Thanks! Yeah, I definitely chose the easy way over the 'right' way for this version with just setting simple thresholds.

I'm not sure how well it will work yet, but for a game controller I might try to have users record their own custom motions - as in, "show me a few of your chosen [high punch] motions to match against in-game."

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#63
post #2

The YouTube video is even funnier: https://youtu.be/h376W93gQq4

I can't believe he only has ~1.5k subscribers, he's absolutely hilarious! I highly recommend everyone to watch that video.

I subscribed, the humor convinced with the execution here is what I could do with more of!

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#64
This is straight up awesome and must watch video just for the lolz.

But there is a thread to pull on here in terms of tangible user interfaces and the replacement of keyboards as a traditional input system. Meta's CTRL-Labs (ex Myo Armband) are working on EMG where just signaling to your muscles can trigger keyboard strokes and the bandwidth is faster than fingers or so they say. There are several other R&D efforts in that direction from BCIs to free space gesture detection through different flavors of computer vision and sensor fusion. Mr Everything Is Hacked is doing it here just for the sheer joy of the journey but there are serious reasons to play around with qwerty alternatives.

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#66

I was lamenting the use of "semaphore" but wikipedia supports them: > Semaphore (lit. 'apparatus for signalling'; from Ancient Greek σῆμα (sêma) 'mark, sign, token', and Greek -φόρος (-phóros) 'bearer, carrier')[1] is the use of an apparatus to create a visual signal transmitted over distance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore I was only familiar with: > [A semaphore] is a variable or abstract data type used…

Knowing about programming semaphores but not visual semaphores seems quite bizarre to me. A bit like thinking flag or register or stack were only computer terms.

Yea, like many computing terms are normal words now being used as jargon

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#68

I was lamenting the use of "semaphore" but wikipedia supports them: > Semaphore (lit. 'apparatus for signalling'; from Ancient Greek σῆμα (sêma) 'mark, sign, token', and Greek -φόρος (-phóros) 'bearer, carrier')[1] is the use of an apparatus to create a visual signal transmitted over distance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore I was only familiar with: > [A semaphore] is a variable or abstract data type used…

In this case, the term semaphore is equivalent to optical telegraph.

The separation isn't completely clear, but take a semaphore like a basic tool that produces signals with a strong predefined signification, like a red light in a highway traffic light. The optical telegraph have a basic signification on their symbols, like letters or numbers, but a wide range of meanings, like the message transmission.

Take a look to the wikipedia information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph

Re: Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard

#69

Author here! Pleasant surprise to find my project at the top of HN this morning with such positive feedback :) I'm happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions for future tweaks. Planning to make this into a customizable full-body game controller as well.

I loved this! Should be customizable so that twerking also allows you to double letters :)
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