Sorcerer Waves Arms, Conjures Art
Whether one waves one's arms majestically -- or flops them around like a madman -- creates two different images. Literally. The Body Brush system, developed by Hong Kong multimedia researchers, takes physical movement and converts it to shapes and colors, live and in real time.

Wired magazine reports (August 2003) that the Body Brush developers demonstrated their latest work to enthusiastic attendees of this year's prestigious Siggraph computer graphics conference in San Diego. Visitors were able to step onto a square stage -- a virtual canvas -- and create an artwork through their movements. Infrared motion-capture systems detect every motion of the body, sending it to 3-D animation software (running on an SGI Octane computer workstation) for interpretation as angles and colors. The results were instantly projected to a nearby 15-foot screen.

Visit the Body Brush web site, which contains a demonstration of the technology

See a summary of this year's Siggraph conference, or order a DVD containing the conference presentation

Read 2002 news stories from CNN or Hong Kong news