Creeptacular face-tracking Halloween portrait
You’ve got a week to build this portrait, whose eyes follow you around the room, for Halloween.
Adafruit have produced a tutorial, courtesy of Tony DiCola, which uses OpenCV and openFrameworks with your Raspberry Pi and camera board to create a picture of pullulating panic. It’s haunted hardware of horripilating hideousness.
You’ll also find instructions on making your own frame in the tutorial: we recommend making one large enough to drill a hole in, so you can conceal the camera board inside before using this to scare your loved ones. It’s elegant and spooky; plus, you can keep it for the rest of the year and use it for another OpenCV project like the Magic Mirror.
16 comments
Jim Manley
” … picture of pullulating panic … haunted hardware of horripilating hideousness … ” – well, I’m glad it was you choosing words this way instead of me this time, Liz! At least there won’t be any pusillanimous pussyfooting going on, per former U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew.
There was a painting in a house my parents rented when I was about eight years old that had eyes that seemed to follow you wherever you moved – very scary, especially during a thunder-and-lightning storm :(
Have a horribly Happy Halloween with hapless, headless honchos haphazardly hunched over in your hollow or hamlet! Oops, I did it again! :D
dan3008
I want to know what happens if there are 2 people in the video… that would confuse it
clive
It goes cross-eyed.
mahjongg
perhaps it would be slightly more effective if only the eyeballs would follow you instead of the whole skull turning.
I know that technically a skull doesn’t have “eyeballs”, but some glowing red dots could give it that impression very effectively.
AndrewS
Would be neat if this was hooked up via a servo to the “Yorick” project from a couple of days ago :)
Or would that be too tremendously terrifying; a spooky supernatural speaking skull? A classically creepy chatting cranium! A monstrously macabre motion-tracking moving mechanised mouthpiece.
I’ll stop now…
Jim Manley
We were about to let you hang yourself with a neck-knotting noose of never-ending, noodle-knocking, ne’er-do-wellness, but you seem to be hanging in there quite well without a push from the populous pointing at your puny pony and puttering with the pull-along draped around its own neck :D
Boni
I say! All these alliterative allusions are addling my awareness! I’ve got a headache!
condew
A similar setup might make a good version of the mirror from Snow White, or a picture of Dorian Gray.
YufamilyHa
Sweet job – nice rasberry!
Philip Ashmore
Is the skull part of OpenCV?
If it is a 3D model, could it jump towards the screen and open its jaw, preferably with a cackling laugh? Who ha ha ha ha ha!
Simon D
Holbein got there first with “The Ambassadors” (1533). Fixed viewing angle, but it was on the end wall of a refectory with steps from a corridor down to the side of that wall. Half way down the perspective works perfectly and the smeared out skull is suddenly visible in Techicolor. The unaware might loose their footing (tee he).
andy
Is there something wrong with my eyes, because I don’t see anything happening..?
Ashley Reid
lol. 2s = pretty good latency. yes.
Alan Jardine
Modern Lisa?
Rodolfo Lam
I know I took a sweet time making this.. but it is finally done.
I made a windows port of the program ready to run. the file is located on m github repository
Rodolfo Lam
Upps… bad formatting.
The program is found here: https://github.com/rlam1/creepyportrait