Pigeon Sim simulates flight, using your arms as wings.
It links a Kinect — via Simple-OpenNI, Processing, some GCSE trigonometry, WebSockets and CoffeeScript — to the Google Earth API and browser plugin.
It also introduces Spindlytext, a nice way to write in the sky with KML, which is used to display various kinds of live data.
There’s a brief write-up, with video clip, in New Scientist. It’s also in the Independent.
Pigeon Sim has been tested on Windows 7 and Mac OS 10.7. The Google Earth plugin seems somewhat more stable and less glitchy on Windows — but this may depend on your graphics card.
- Install Simple-OpenNI, OpenNI and Processing, following the instructions provided by Simple-OpenNI. Note that on 64-bit Windows, you probably still want the 32-bit OpenNI libraries, since Processing comes with its own 32-bit Java.
- Install the p5websocket library (version 0.1.3+) for Processing.
- Launch Chrome with the
--disable-web-securitycommand-line flag (to allow cross-domain AJAX requests for the live data), and open web_client/index.html. If you don’t already have it, you’ll need to agree to install the Google Earth plugin. - Plug in your Kinect, run the pigeonsim Processing sketch, and fly!
- Alternatively, if you don’t have a Kinect, run the pigeon_dummy sketch. Click and drag to bank/steer, and press [up] to flap, [down] to dive, and [space] to go home. This mainly defeats the point, though.
This code is released under the GPL v3. To negotiate GPL-incompatible uses, feel free contact me.