TouchDesigner: Educational Sandbox
For this sandbox I wanted to add video files, images, and visuals created within TouchDesigner to the depth layers of a sandbox, much like my previous project, but with the ability to give more story and information.
I had a meeting with my professor/mentor Christopher Andersen (early childhood education professor who did consulting for Magic School Bus and Bill Nye) and showed him the video of the topographical sandbox. We started making jokes and talking about uses for it in schools. I came home and started working on a very Owen proof of concept which is my Educational Sandbox.
I like the idea of creating an interactive sandbox that can be loaned out to schools free of charge for a week at a time or so - I've seen interactive/augmented reality sandboxes for sale online for schools costing something like 6k and that's outrageous.
I decided to try a different method of working with the Kinect depth imagery based on a suggestion from my friend Adam Katz - who said to play with the Lookup TOP. So after a little tutorialing I found this is a great method for turning the grayscale depth imagery into different visuals. I still used a ramp to create a texture - but then used a Chroma Key TOP and Composite TOP to replace those colors with the visuals I wanted.
I may post this project online at some point - but it's busy busy busy in my world currently. For now, check out the project file from the previous project if you want to experiment with creating a sandbox.
