You show me a joystick, I give you an audience
rzwitserloot posted in me, programming on February 25th, 2006

I stumbled onto a book called Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. It’s all about how relatively uninformed masses can collectively reach pretty amazing results anyway*.

A particular excerpt that caught my attention is about letting an entire audience play pong by giving everyone a big red bat and using a camera to recognize them. Raise your bat if you think the paddle should be going up, lower it if you think it should be going down. There is no intermediate choice for a single audience member.

Interesting, because I need to explain agent technology to a mixed audience of A.I. gurus and complete newbies who don’t even know how a computer works (i.e: my parents), for my thesis defense this wednesday. I could use something like this to make one of the points of agent technology clearly, and in a new way to those who’ve heard it all before, and as a plus, something like is a pretty sweet wake-up call, as well.

So, I have created my own version (looked and looked, but can’t find anything. If you did find something, or know of how I can get a hold of software to do this, let me know!) and it works without a hitch… except QT4J (A quicktime library set for java, constructed by apple) has an inexplicable 600 millisecond delay between the captured image and handing it off to my code. Imagine playing pong where all your actions are delayed by over half a second.

Not good.

I’m now trying to figure out a way to make it instant, by looking into QT4J on windows and JMF on windows and hoping the delays aren’t as bad there, but if this keeps up, I’ll have to come up with far less interesting games instead, or drop this plan altogether.

I’m testing whatever I end up having tuesday afternoon, I’ll record it (just to have a backup in case it blows up on wednesday) and I’ll post the results then.

*) Alper has reviewed a similar book, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki on his blog, here.