It's a Very Victorious Christmas on the Third Floor

[Intro] [The theme] [The folks] [The competition] [The tech-stuff]

[Some notes on the "advanced computer vision technology"]

Without excessive technology, it might as well be "Christmas in Sociology". After all, isn't Christmas really about soldering and C++?

Two systems were set aside for tech-i-fying the Third Floor Christmas... Santa would have preferred flat panels, but then again undergrads probably don't wander into Santa's factory and steal stuff.

Ron has been transfored into an elf... the face-detection is so sweet it even finds mini-Ron.

Can you even tell that Dan wasn't actually part of this charming anime Christmas scene?

...or that Ron isn't really wearing this hat?

Ron thinks it's pretty funny that he's wearing a sock for a hat. Which it is. The "sock for a hat" gag never gets stale.

The mouse normally rested inside the comfort of his mouse house...

...but at a very "natural" and "mouse-like" interval of 10.0000 seconds, he would occasionally emerge into the world for a visit.

There's no computer inside this box. No sir, this is a mouse out-house. Nothing to see here.

A montage of scenes to which Dan and Neel have been transported... you can hardly tell that it's all virtual, eh? Doesn't it look real?

Some Tech Notes

The "become an elf" system was Monzy's baby. A face detection library (many thanks to MERL) was used to find faces in the scene, with scaling information. Location and scaling information was used to blend the hat and beard images into the acquired images. The system was written in C++ and ran via a webcam on a PIII laptop.
Neel and Dan did the "virtual wonderland" system. Background subtraction was used to find pixels that corresponded to people moving in the scene. The mask generated by background subtraction was used to blend in the background, then place and blend the hat images. Background subtraction was repeated periodically when no motion was detected for a few minutes, to adapt to changing light throughout the day. The system was written in C++ and ran via a webcam on a PIII desktop.
Dan and Jim set up the extremely life-like mouse, which was actually a cheap RC car. The remote control was wired to a PC parallel port (okay, the mouse out-house had a parallel port), and pins were periodically flipped to bring the car in and out of the house. Jeff, Merrie, and Brian artistically turned the moving RC car into a mouse in a mouse-house.

[Intro] [The theme] [The folks] [The competition] [The tech-stuff]