BALLS

BALLS are logistical lighting spheres

BALLS is a smart juggling balls platform that will function to both give feedback to the juggler about thier technique (in training mode) as well as provide an immersive experience to the audience (in performance mode).

Overview

Information about how the juggler is throwing the balls will be gathered using a camera located on a raspberry pi via OpenCV blob detection. This information will be used to decide which color to make the LEDs on each ball light up to which will be sent to radio modules on the balls.

Training Mode Ideas

• Pattern correctness training: Balls will light up in a gradient between two colors which will be decided based on how uniformly the balls are being juggled. A sloppy and uneven pattern will result in the balls being closer to one side of the gradient, while an evenly spaced pattern will make the balls light up closer to the other side.

• Height correctness training: Balls light up at a certain set hieght that the juggler is trying to ideally throw all the balls to peak at. If the ball doesn't light up it isn't being thrown high enough, if it lights up before the peak it is being thrown too high.

• Juggling without looking training: To be done in a pitch black or mostly dark room. Balls light up for a period of thier arc before cutting to black and requiring the juggler to catch them without using their eyes. Light up period can be gradually reduced until the juggler is catching and throwing the balls without using their eyes at all.

Performance Mode Ideas

• Left-Right lighting: Balls thrown left to right light up one color, Balls thrown right to left light up another color.

• Gradient lighting: Balls light up in a gradient between two colors based on some characteristic about their flight path. Ex. ball height, ball speed, ball location(left to right), etc.

• Color array lighting: Each location in the frame of the camera corresponds to a different color. As balls pass through a location, they light up to that color. Imagine this with circle juggling:

More info on this can be seen here where if done fast enough the balls would form a colorful circle. An example of what this might look like is something like how the textures of clothing are animated on the Cartoon Network show Chowder:

As you can see, the texture is fixed in the frame, and as the character moves the texture stays in place. This is the idea we would like to implement, where you have a color array/pattern and as the balls pass through each of the regions the color is updated (ie. as the balls pass up the left side they are blue, as they go across the top they transition to red, and as the fall down the right side they transition to green, and repeat the cycle as they are circle juggled)