Eyebrow Pong
Development of eyebrow controlled pong
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Development of eyebrow controlled pong
Last updated
Was this helpful?
I wanted to control pong with my eyebrows. Being that Pong is the original videogame, the idea is that Pong illustates the potential of face control.
It seemed the logical place for me to start this was in Processing.
I managed to modify a preexiting processing single player pong project to be controlled with your eyebrows. In this version you could control the right paddle with your eyebrows, and the left paddle was controlled using the 'W' and 'S' keys as up and down.
I then managed to connect this version to shiftr.io, this meant that you could control the right paddle with your eyebrows, and another person using the 'Eyebrow_Send' sketch used to control the ESP32 Enabled Objects could cotrol the left paddle. However, this was all happening on one screen. This meant that the first player would have to facetime the person and have them watch them both play the game through facetime. This version is what is referred to as 'open source eyebrow pong' on the pong website and on the digital toolkit.
I then sook to develop the game within processing using shiftr.io as the main communication to link the screens using websockets. This was way beyond my capability and i didn't manage to get working. However I did manage to develop it so that player two could see the score of the game on their version of the 'Eyebrow_Send'.
I then realised that I would want to make playing eyebrow pong easier than having to download both faceOSC & processing and extra processing libraries to get it to work. At this point I decided to use p5.js. I coded eyebrowpong using Kyle McDonalds facetracking example using clmtrackr within p5.js on the p5 editor, combined with One Man Army Studios version of pong, which I coded alongside them via a youtube tutorial.
The outcome of this was a single-player version of eyebrow pong that is embedded within the browser. Available to try out here:
This version is fully working, although can struggle with some lighting conditions & has a slight tendency to 'glitch' when it loses track of the face. However, once it 'locks-on' to your face it works very well and is fun to play.