Process

This project is an interactive art piece meant to visualize ASL and transform it into tangible art. I used Handtracker.js to access the user’s camera and track their hand placements, drawing different colored strokes at each finger. This results in a makeshift paintbrush using your hands. In theory, a user could just play around with this and create artwork using their hands as a medium, but the specific use case I was experimenting with was to translate ASL into visual art.

A signer could sign a whole sentence or merely a word and see an artistic data visualization of what it looks like on the canvas. Users can also click the screen to download/capture the image and use the backspace key to start over.

Using Handtracker.js was a whole new learning experience since I had to read the documentation and figure out how exactly to use the plugin in coordination with p5.js. I also tried to be intentional about refactoring my code and making it as clean as possible, rather than just functional.