Author’s Readme

About the game

This game requires a webcam. Apologies to all you kids that don’t have one hooked up. Simply click on your face or any other relatively distinctly colored area in order to start tracking it. A green circle will appear where the game thinks your face is. Move left and right to dodge the columns as they approach. Try to dodge as many as you can before hitting 3. If the game loses your face, you can click on it again to re-set the tracking target.

License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License Basically, feel free to use and modify this code, but don’t make money off it.

Shout outs

The music is the bassline from Georg Feil’s “Synth Sample” 1985, via Andre Michelle. Music processing code was minimally adapted from Andre Michelle’s synth demo, and without him I’d never have been able to put it together.

The 3d code was inspired by a few online tutorials, notably Senocular’s ( http://www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/flash10drawingapi/ ) and Sherif Abdou’s ( http://sherifabdou.com/2008/06/simple-3d-cube-in-flex-using-flash-player-10/ )

The mean-shift code is entirely my own, but implementation was helped by several online resources including lecture materials from Robert Collins’ computer vision course at Penn State. I don’t have any connection to that university, but the course material was great. http://www.cse.psu.edu/~rcollins/CSE486/lecture29_6pp.pdf

Note for Mac iSight users: you may have to alter flash’s default camera settings in order to play FaceDodge. Right-click on the movie and choose “Settings…”, then click on the camera icon. Choose “IIDC FireWire Video” from the menu. You may have to reload the page to get the settings to take effect. See http://weblogs.macromedia.com/cantrell/archives/2004/02/flash_and_the_a.html

See my site for a full write-up: http://cosmodro.me

Judge’s Comments

Michael: FaceDodge didn’t really work for me. My computer would ask if the game could access my camera, but then nothing would happen. However, using an image of my face as a motion-captured object to dodge things with? I love the idea.

Chris: Technically very impressive and fun! The face tracking is quite fun to get you ‘into’ the game, I lost when I moved a bit too fast, but this is forgivable with the limitations. Face tracking and dynamic music are technically amazing. There’s a lot here for 4k, which is why I think it should be the winner.

Panayoti: Overachieving is the best word to describe Face Dodge. The amount of technology piled into this entry is nothing short of amazing. Easily the most technically impressive entry in the competition. The gameplay was a bit lacking, though, and is the only thing that kept it from total victory for me.

Vote

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