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Social Distance Kissing with Matthew Wachter

Finding himself in isolation with a couple of Mirobots, Matthew Wachter wasted no time setting up a rich tableau controlled via TouchDesigner and streaming on Twitch incorporating robots, big lips, googly eyes and a rainforest backdrop complete with Tiger King tiger ;) You can make them kiss with text commands, it's oddly meditative and you keep going back for more, have a go! 
 

Derivative: How did you find yourself in isolation with two robots?

Matthew Wachter: I've had a few robots and humans here to keep my company for the past 2 or 3 weeks (lost count). The second Mirobot arrived a day or two ago.

Derivative: Anything else in the works?

Matthew Wachter: This project was kind of a proof of concept for some fun interactive projects that we are working on at VT. Expect to see robots, light painting and arcade games before the pandemic is over.

 

Derivative: Can you explain how you made this?

Matthew Wachter: Programming wise it was pretty quick to put together. I used the TD-Mirobot a TouchDesigner component that can be used to control the WLkata Mirobot on my github to control the robots and built a simple position sequencer to make them kith.

For the Twitch chat integration I used the twitchio python module which simply sends a TCP message to the TouchDesigner scene which contains the username of the kiss instigator to be displayed on the screen.

The stream camera is fed into TouchDesigner which keys out the greenscreen (best it can given an absolute trash lighting situation) and then sends the feed to OBS Studio via NDI which then streams to Twitch.

Stay tuned for more and download Matt's TD-Mirobot assets here

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