Hello,
I am looking for a leap motion device that would make something appear on a big wall-size screen when someone passes by. I have no idea if this kind of device exists, and if it does, I would like to know how it works, what it takes to instal it before an event, how much it costs and how, technically, I could decide of the things that would appear on the screen.
Thank you very much for your help,
Victoire
Hi Victoire,
Here are answers to your questions & comments:
You mention leap motion, do you mean the Leap Motion 3D Motion Controller RB-Lep-01]? If so, please note that the leap motion sensor is only meant to detect hands/fingers’ position and gestures, not people in an area.
There are most likely system that are ready-made for this purpose. That being said, we are not aware of any specific product since we mostly focus on DIY, electronics and robotics.
Well, the first step would be to run down your exact requirements so you can determine exactly what you need. “Make something appear on a big wall-size screen” is rather vague. Do you need the display to toggle on/off or change what is displayed? If your screen system can work from an HDMI signal, then you may simply want to use a small SBC (Single Board Computer) such as a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ RB-Ras-20] to do the work of displaying the information on your screen.
What you mostly need to identify is what type of interaction do you wish to detect and then choose the appropriate sensor for it. Then, you also need to determine what type of content (your output) you wish to generate and choose a proper device to make that happen, too. As mention before, a SBC is probably a good choice for your output.
As for the sensor to trigger the display, there are many things that can be used depending on what you are trying to detect. If it is a person walking by then you could use anything from a PIR (Passive IR) detector; similar to what is used in alarm systems, a LIDAR, a sonar and plenty of other things, too, depending on what kind of interactions you need.
This would be achieved by the code running on the RPi. In most cases, you can probably get away with doing only Python which should be simple to get started with since there is a large community with many examples and tutorials available for most situations you can encounter. Of course, that would still need some work to create & adapt to your specific needs.
We hope this helps get you started. Once you’ve figured out more details about your input/output requirements, feel free to post again here and we will be glad to offer further assistance with part selection.
Sincerely,
Hi on the topic of similar to LeapMotion: it’s probably possible to use XBox Kinect for what you want to do but this is now discontinued and there has been a vacuum on the market for this type of products since big companies bought all the little companies that made these things and then discontinued making them. It’s still possible to find Kinects on ebay and such.
Then have a look at these as well:
Creative BlasterX Senz3D
Intel RealSense SR300
Kinect is probably the easiest to use though.
In any case it will take some diving into the technicalities.
Check out:
developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/kinect
github.com/IntelRealSense/libre … ag/v2.13.0
myrobotlab.org/
BUT … maybe you can get away with a much simpler sensor if you just want to trigger an action when someone passes by.
arduino or raspberry pi + ultrasonic sensor + a pretty standard script + maybe some relay or something = <$50 and minimal effort to set up
it would work on the principle that when the ultrasound bounces back quicker than usual it means something is close by and then it can switch a relay or play a video on a screen over hdmi or something
However there are more expensive, more reliable and more advanced sensors for sensing that people are nearby. There are thermal sensor (like motion sensors for security systems), laser distance sensors, even depending on the situation CO2 sensors. Camera based systems are the most complicated but may be able to do much more than simple sensors.
