Yes, indeed, Engadget.com said it correctly, this isn’t the newest idea around, but very well executed: The Sensacell reactive floor installation at the Comunitat Valenciana in Spain is a beauty, super reactive and very flat in construction. I could see myself spending hours playing around with this thing. Make sure not only to check out the video below, but also the Sensacell Website, which shows detailed product information and application examples.

via Engadget

This is a small dream come true: an affordable z-depth camera, with a decent framerate (60 fps!) and a good resolution (1.3 Mega-pixel, which is more than enough for interaction), all wrapped up in a webcam-sized case. We’ve seen various of chunky, slow z-cams before, but this seems to be promising - for sure we will get one and try it out, and hope we can give a report on how it works with vvvv soon. We just hope this is not a hoax, but the website of 3DV looks quite professional. Still, we haven’t received a reply concerning the availability and price. According to engadget (article from January) it is expected until the end of 2008.

Including the z-depth opens up various possibilities in interaction, these are the most important I can think of at the moment:

• gesture controlled navigation made easy
• finger- or headtracking (think Minority Report and other science-fiction films) but without any hand-gloves or stickies on your fingertips!
• depth-keying makes the green-screen in studios becomes redundant
• motion-control (however, I imagine that this works very poor compared to real motion capture systems)

The Z-Cam by company 3DV Systems from Israel works with the so-called “Time-of-Flight” principle, where “the Depth information is captured by emitting pulses of infra-red light to all objects in the scene and sensing the reflected light from the surface of each object.” (from 3dv website) This is the most obvious way (similar to echolocation done by dolphins, bats and so on, I guess) and most of the cams work that way - but mostly below 15 fps, which is not suitable for interaction.

Some more info and videos are available on the website of 3DV Systems (be warned: poor video quality, but you get the ideas what you can do with this camera).

Looking at a screen becomes way more interesting, if you actually can look behind it. There’s a couple of ways to track the position of someone’s face and point of view (easily done with infrared goggles as we know from here). But faceAPI allows the simple use of a webcam and the job is done.