White Glove Tracking visualization
Video visualizations of the data from White Glove Tracking, an open source project initiated by Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth. The data contains the approximate location and size of Michael Jackson's trademark white glove in all 10060 frames of his landmark Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean on March 25, 1983. The data was collected through crowdsourcing: anyone online could inspect one frame of the original performance video and submit the salient information for that frame. This enabled a distributed data-gathering process driven by volunteers.
I made 3 video sketches using the WGT data: Slinky, Stretchy, and Shapely. Following the open source nature of the WGT project, the Processing source code for the 3 sketches is available below.
Before watching my videos, you might first watch the video of the original performance (YouTube) which is part of the dataset available on the WGT site.
Made with Processing.
Slinky highlights the fluidity of Jackson's movements.
Slinky (QuickTime, 640x480, 75MB)
Slinky (Source code) (ZIP)
Stretchy brings to animated life the variety of glove sizes, positions, and contours.
Stretchy (QuickTime, 640x480, 45MB)
Stretchy (Source code) (ZIP)
Shapely illustrates the prominence of another type of white glove in Jackson's life: the surgical glove.
For the imagery, I used a video of Jackson's morphing faces (Google Video) which was originally a promo for the Five TV channel in the UK.
Shapely (QuickTime, 640x480, 33MB)
Shapely (Source code) (ZIP)