And since he had not seen any interactive scarecrows at earlier festivals, he decided to give his jumping cow a lively character. Construction of the Moo Bot is broken up in to three parts. The skeleton is built from lumber slabs and planks. The insides are then gutted with all of the electronics. Finally, the whole cow is skinned using sheet metal and finished off with greebles to add detailing such as ears, legs, spots and nostrils. And since it is installed in the open, its skin also doubles up to help Moo bot stay dry on the insides when it rains. To make Moo Bot easy to transport from barn to launchpad, its broken up in to three modules the body, the head and the mounting post with the moon. Moo Bot has an Arduino brain which wakes up when the push button on its mouth is pressed. Its two OLED screen eyes open up, and the MP3 player sends bovine sounding audio clips to a large sound box. The Arduino also triggers some lights around the Moon. Juice for running the whole show comes from a bank of eight, large type D cells wired to provide 6 V enough to keep Moo Bot fed for at least a couple of months. Check out the video after the break to hear Moo bot tell some cow jokes its pretty funny. Were rooting for it to win the competition Go Moo bot. Continue reading The Cow Jumped Over The Moon. Stimulant Depth Sensor ShootoutUpdated June 3. Stimulants mission is to create smart spaces which engage visitors in ways that cant be duplicated with devices they have in their home or their pocket. We achieve this through a variety of sensors and cameras feeding data into custom software, running on bespoke computing hardware, and outputting to any number of display or projection devices. Because it all begins with the sensing technologies, we spend plenty of time evaluating various products that help us determine how people move through a space. Depth sensing cameras are a great way to do that, and here we present a comparison of the cameras weve been able to get into our lab. In this article well give brief descriptions of ten different cameras, and end with a comparison of their hardware specifications. We wont end up with a recommendation for best camera, because different devices are suited to different applications. Instead, well help you narrow the field of devices which might work for your situation. Well add additional products as were able to get our hands on them. Follow stimulant or our RSS feed to be notified. At a White House press conference today, President Trump accused former FBI director James Comey of perjuring himself before the US Senatea very serious charge. No more missed important software updates UpdateStar 11 lets you stay up to date and secure with the software on your computer. Johan Beyers built an elegantly simple Dog Speedometer project that uses a POV display to display a running dogs speed without the benefit of an accelerometer. Jon Jafari is JonTron, a video game critic on Polaris. Using a cheerful, energetic style and plenty of cutaway gags and visual puns, he talks about a. If youre a manufacturer and youd like your product included here, get in touch at hellostimulant. The Devices. Occipital Structure. The Structure sensor is designed to attach physically to i. OS devices to provide 3. D scanning capabilities and enable mixed reality scenarios. There is also some support for Windows, mac. OS, Linux and Android using the Open. NI 2 project. Unlike other sensors compared here, its not really for tracking people or gestures, but more for scanning and tracking the world itself. Using the meshes generated by the sensor and SDK, its possible to create mixed reality experiences in which virtual objects appear to interact with the physical world, with proper occlusion and physics. Orbbec Persee. The Orbbec Persee is an interesting entry in that it pairs a depth camera with a ARM based SOC. This allows for complete system with low power consumption and a small form factor. The sensor itself is the exact same as the Astra Pro and is programed the exact same way, using either Open. Stimulant is an innovation studio that brings spaces to life by transforming them into pioneering, anyscale interactive environments. NI2 or the Astra SDK which is the preferred approach due to internal optimization not present in the Open. NI2 SDK. The SOC supports both Android and Ubuntu 1. Android. As of this writing the SDK is still only available for C and Java via JNI bindings. Many of the examples have not been ported over to Android or ARM Linux and documentation is very sparse so be prepared to go digging in the forums if you have an issue. One of the most exciting features was that we were able to stream the a depth image and point cloud over the network using ROS and the gigabit ethernet link. The ability to simply stream depth data over the network resolves a key pain point for many of our projects, namely USB extension. The Orbbec Persee is good for distributed sensing solutions where direct access via C is helpful and localized processing can reduce your hardware costs. Intel SR3. 00. The SR3. F2. 00. The SR3. 00 does everything the F2. We found the depth feed from this camera less noisy than that from the F2. So even though though they have the same resolution the SR3. D face tracking. The packaging for this device is a bit unusual, while it has a standard 14 in. A nice feature was the removable USB3 cord which allows users to use a longer or shorter cords based on their needs. The SR3. 00 is compatible with the Real. Sense SDK which is extremely capable in its current iteration and provides very good documentation and examples for a number of platforms and languages including face tracking, hand tracking, and user background segmentation. The Intel Real. Sense SR3. Orbbec Astra. Orbbec is the newest entrant into the 3. D camera space, but the team has been at it for a while. One of the companys founders also kickstarted the open source hacking of the original Kinect in 2. Their first products are the Astra and Astra Pro, which are both infrared depth sensors with a 6. FPS, but the pro version has an enhanced RGB camera. The SDK is rather basic though, supporting only the older C Open. NI framework. Support for open. Frameworks, Cinder, and Unity 3. D is said to be forthcoming. The SDK supports basic hand tracking which can be used for gestural interfaces, but not full skeleton tracking. The unit can sense as far as 8 meters away, which beats the range of most other sensors. The Orbecc Astra is a good choice for longer range indoor applications developed in C, where raw point cloud data or hand positions are needed for interaction. Intel Real. Sense R2. Intels Real. Sense cameras are meant to be integrated into to OEM products, but the developer toolkits are available for use in installation projects. The R2. 00 product is the second Real. Sense product to ship from Intel, and its a tiny USB 3 device with an infrared sensing range of about. The R is for rear facing, meaning its primary use case is to be integrated into the back of a tablet or laptop display. The SDK is quite robust, supporting C, C, Java. Script, Processing, Unity, and Cinder. The SDK supports face and expression tracking, but not hand tracking or full skeletons. The device really comes into its own when the camera in motion for augmented reality or 3. D scanning applications. The Intel Real. Sense R2. Microsoft Encarta 2016. Stereolabs ZED Stereo Camera. The Stereolabs ZED product is unique among this list as it does not use infrared light for sensing, but rather a pair of visible light sensors to produce a stereo image, which is then delivered to software as a video stream of depth data. It works well outdoors to a depth of 2. FPS, or VGA at 1. FPS. While the hardware is quite powerful, the provided SDK is pretty limited to simply capturing the depth stream, without any higher level interpretation. Any tracking of objects, hands, faces, or bodies would need to be implemented by the developer. The Zed Stereo camera is great for high frame rate, outdoor, or long range applications which only require a raw depth stream. Intel Real. Sense F2. The F2. 00 version of the Real. Sense product is meant to be front facing, and excels at tracking faces, hands, objects, gestures, and speech. Its meant to be mounted to the front of a display or tablet and has a sensing range of about 0. FPS VGA depth stream. The SDK is quite robust, supporting C, C, Java. Script, Processing, Unity, and Cinder. The Intel Real. Sense F2. Microsoft Kinect for XBox One. The second generation of the Kinect hardware is a beast its physically the largest sensor weve looked at, and it requires a dedicated USB 3. For all that, you get a wider field of view and very clean depth data at a range of. Where Microsoft really shines is in the quality of the SDK, which provides full skeleton tracking of six people simultaneously, basic hand openclose gestures, and face tracking. The SDK works out of the box with Microsoft application frameworks, but the Kinect Common Bridge enables support for Cinder and open. Frameworks, and Microsoft provides a plugin for Unity 3. D. On the downside, its tough to extend the device very far from the host computer, you can only use one sensor per computer, and only on Windows 8. The Kinect for XBox One is great for medium range tracking of multiple skeletons and faces in a space, and works with most popular application frameworks, but the sensor must be located close to the host computer. DUO mini lx. The DUO mini lx camera is a tiny USB powered stereo infrared camera that provides high frame rate depth sensing to a range of about 3m. It includes IR emitters for indoor use, but can be run in a passive mode to accept ambient infrared light meaning it can be used outdoors in sunlight. The Dense. 3D SDK provides a basic depth map via a C interface, but no higher level tracking of hands, faces, or skeletons. It does however work on OS X and Linux, and even ARM based systems.