A tool that "traces" the path of a point in motion

Design Lounge Interaction design
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I’m a graphic design student currently working on my thesis project that deals with utilizing motion capture and gestures as a way to create animations and perform video editing tasks. Basically this would be a plugin of sorts that would pair with programs like after effects and blender.

Having little to no experience with coding, I quickly found that this wasn’t something I could easily build on my own , let alone in a few months time. The “real” product I want to showcase will be conveyed through video editing and overlapping animation overtop footage. However, when I display my concept I’d love to build an interactive installation that works as a working prototype of what this could be.

My idea is that I want to build something that “traces” movement in 2D space. Either with the use of movement a body part like an arm (this would be ideal - but as I understand this would probably require machine learning?) or with the use of a marker - like a brightly colored object that the webcam recognizes as the object to follow, like a glove. I’d like to be able to playback the traced animations in a loop - say record 5 seconds of movement and then the screen would playback the animation for a few cycles and then reset.
I made a crudely drawn diagram to help explain what I was thinking below.

Any ideas on how to start building something like this for a total newbie?

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For this I would probably look at VR gaming hardware and/or MS Kinect. They usually have SDKs which make such things easier, e.g. providing a skeleton abstraction of a person in front of it.

I remember that friends of mine and I experimented with with several years back. I guess we used processing and openCV back then; it would be something like brightest point but for some channel. Or you go for comparing images and draw where there is a difference to other images.