Ice Tracker

Ice Tracker is a camera tracking application driving an interactive ice rink light show.

In winter 2011 I collaborated with Jacob Sikker Remin on an interactive light show installation called 'Vinterlys'. The task was to track people skating and use that data to influence the color and speed of lights highlighting the ice rink.

At the beginning we tried to track individual people but it proved to be difficult with low light conditions and irregular spotlight lighting. The breakthrough came with the idea of dividing the rink into zones that will be tracked and activated separately. This way we could also adjust the sensitivity separately for each zone to improve tracking robustness. We used OSC to communicate between my OpenFrameworks app and Jacob's Processing light controller.

,Real lights on the ice

,Debug view

Simulation

During early stages of development we used little app to simulate behaviour of virtual skates to drive the show.