The future of Lighting Control

[kitlane]

... instead of creating focus positions and continually updating them based on small blocking changes etc the talent will have yet another body pack and no matter what, the tallent won't be able to miss their special.

 

As I'm sure most of you know there are already a number of systems that attempt to do this. I think the point about a technology like the Kinect is that the talent wouldn't need to wear another body pack. The system would track their position and even who they are by depth mapping, skeleton tracking and feature recognition. Tracking someone with a body worn transmitter tells you where they are (or rather, where the transmitter is) is 3D space but tells you little or nothing about their orientation. Skeleton tracking can tell you when they are crouching, or bowing, or turned their back on you.

 

I'm not saying we can do any of this yet. Nor am I saying that this is how it will be, or should be done. But it's fun playing with the technology and we might end up with something really useful and useable.

 

 

Of course, this'll be the point where the desk programmer has to spend some time storing their biometrics on the desk so that it can recognise them ...

 

 

Not too much time. It took about 3 or 4 minutes to train my XBox to recognise me.

[dbuckley]

The Troika Dance mob use Isadora, and cameras, which can visualy track bods and use it to do real time video tricks; I'm pretty certain it could manipulate lighting

[mac.calder]

I don't think I would trust a solely camera based system any time soon. There are a lot of bodies on most stages, moving scenery etc etc etc. And the bodies change - full costuming etc.

 

I think the ideal system would be an IR beacon integrated with an RFID tag, which could conceivably weigh just a couple of grams (that is with technology as it stands right now with a watch battery). Blacktrax main weight is in the fact that it has an active transmitter with velocity sensor.