Light Saber + Kinect = Bogus?

I was doing more research for my Kinect project and found this video, interesting.

Apparently, this guy has an active light saber renderer implemented into his Kinect software. All the comments I see are eating this up!!! I really do not buy this at all. I think it would take less time to simply make a video recording and add the light saber as an after thought. Let me go a little bit into what you have to do to create this effect.

http://www.kincharbamin.com/Adding-Saber-Glow.html
Here’s a quick link on some implementations of building a light saber into your videos. This is simple and easy using the latest technology out there, you simply have to select your objects, create correct follow’s, and render your video. Back in the day, say 1970, or what I was doing in late 1990, to create this effect you have to splice every frame of the video and draw in your light saber. Once each frame has the light saber correctly in place, you could then re-attach all of the images to create the video. Tedious!

Now, for an application to do this, the application would have to isolate where to automatically draw your light saber. You can do this a couple ways. The first way would be the “green screen effect,” much like a weather man has a green screen for his background, if you created a rare color for your broom-stick: hot pink, green, purple; you can then isolate your object and draw in your light saber.

You can see by the blown up mirror picture that there are many spots where the color of the broom-stick is the same as the color of other objects in the room. If this was the method used, a lot of the screen would look like a jumble of glowing red.

Second method would be similar to the “green screen effect,” but instead we isolate two spots representing where the light saber would be drawn. The two locations would be the top and bottom of the light saber line that is drawn across the screen. I saw one sign that there may be green tape on the broom stick, but I could not isolate anything on the top. And then, I saw three green squares in the background which took out my theory.

Third method could be the combination of Depth, Color, and motion. This is immediately blown away from the beginning. The resting object in place, fitting with the background.

Sorry everybody, but this doesn’t do it for me. I guess this is another reason I started this blog. So many people blindly follow and believe… I hope I can spot them and take them down.

Here’s another example of bloggers screwing it up: http://phillihp.com/2011/01/18/steve-jobs-health-tech-crunch-mis-interprets/

Here are videos that are actually legitimate, and very cool: