MoviePilot
MoviePilot
by Nitin Shantharam, David Resnick, and Rebecca Maessen
What is it?
MoviePilot is an interactive gesture-controlled movie discovery system designed to be placed in movie theater lobbies. The user performs natural gestures in front of a display in order to “pilot” through information about movies and play trailers. MoviePilot provides a novel, fun, and informational service to theaters and moviegoers.
MoviePilot will work well in further expanding ubiquitous computing technologies in the moviegoing experience. Theaters are already at the forefront of entertainment technology and recent years have seen the incorporation of ubicomp with e-ticketing in theaters, and websites like Fandango and Movietickets that enable mobile access to movie showtimes and e-ticketing. MoviePilot builds on this already thriving ubicomp platform, is relatively low-cost, and has a high upside for both theaters and customers.
Screenshots
What does it do?
MoviePilot allows customers to explore detailed information – movie poster, description, MPAA rating, user rating, trailer, run time and show times. The movies shown can be customized for any theater to display the movies in the box office and movies coming soon. We believe that MoviePilot will fill an informational gap in movie theaters and provide theaters with an activity-of-interest to attract more customers.
The display would be quite large so that many people could gather around to see it while the system is able to recognize one person as the “pilot”. MoviePilot adds the benefit of discovering a movie on a big screen with their friends and strangers around them–a primary reason they came to the theater in the first place instead of watching alone at home.
How do you use it?
The pilot is “captained” by the system by holding her hands up to the sides of their head until she sees circles, representing her hands, appear on the display. Once recognized by the system, the pilot can “take control” by moving her hands next to each other with her palms facing the screen. The control-state is indicated by the grey circles turning white. When she drags her hands to the right, MoviePilot browses one movie to the right. Same goes for dragging to the left. This is how to navigate through the selection of movies. To play a trailer, the user drags her hands up. To exit the trailer, drag them down. Help information is presented in a persistent box along the bottom of the screen and details all the gestures the system recognizes.
What technologies does it use?
MoviePilot uses the Microsoft Kinect’s 3D camera, the NITE/OpenNI framework to generate motion tracking data points, and the Processing programming environment to code our custom software. The Kinect consists of an RGB video camera, IR video camera, IR illuminator, and microphone (not used in this project). We use NITE’s user recognition and skeleton tracking abilities to generate 3-axis data points for the user’s hands. We stream the hand location data into Processing where we implemented the gesture recognition, graphical display, and movie content information.
