018 - Ballpoint

Pen Evolution
Ballpoint with SlitherIO
Configuration UI

What it does

Ballpoint is the Kinect for the common man. Ever dreamed of delving into the world of motion-based games without also going into debt? Ballpoint has you covered.

To use Ballpoint, simply build your very own Ballpoint Pen using an orange ping pong ball, and attach any stick onto it! Video Demo. Unfortunately, that may set you back about 50 cents :( Then, proceed to download and install our Ballpoint application on your PC.

Ballpoint uses your webcam to detect the position of the ball in 3D, and with a bit of configuration, you'll be able to map specific movement patterns to key presses, mouse movements, and more! Developers can also use our Javascript API to directly access the (x, y, z) coordinates detected by our algorithm, and use them to build custom controls directly into their motion-based games.

How we built it

Our backend tracking system uses tracking.js to detect the location and size of the ball on the webcam capture feed, and uses that information to determine the 3D coordinates of the ball with respect to the webcam. It then uses Electron to interact with RobotJS to handle mouse and keyboard actions.