Little Magic Stories from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Chris O’Shea makes great stuff using a hacked Kinect. This latest experiment is a performance system called Little Magic Stories. It uses a Kinect sensor and a glass screen to create a “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion. Kids can create and animate their own little characters and then interact with them, catching eggs, smacking bugs, and running wild on stage.

Chris writes:

I used the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system for this project, allowing the graphics to appear to be alongside the performers. This uses a technique called Pepper’s ghost, and you can see the technical set-up here.

An Xbox Kinect camera was used to track the performers on stage. The Kinect was preferred for use over a normal camera for a variety of reasons. Firstly as a depth camera, I can tell when the performers are near the front of the stage, and therefore level with the graphics in terms of projection plane. Also as the depth works in the IR spectrum, it ignores the projected image and stage lighting that can change throughout different scenes.

via ChrisOshea.org