All posts by nouyang

creating a (semi-custom) avatar for livestreams (e.g. chibi avatars) using posenet demo

Example avatar

blah blah background info

This past weekend I looked into how to create an avatar, like the chibi ones that people use for livestreams, per the following instructions:

Become a grass virtual Youtuber and stream yourself. Demonstrate that you can control the model. The stream should have a minimum length of 2 minutes.

https://puzzlefactory.place/puzzles/touch-grass-challenge-impossible

I did this as part of MIT mystery hunt 2023, specifically the scavenger hunt. I put way too much time into it in some sense, but also the point of mystery hunt is to make friends and have fun for me, and this scavenger hunt certainly helped a lot with this.

Instructions

They have a great demo where you can actually just drag-and-drop a SVG in to change your avatar!

https://pose-animator-demo.firebaseapp.com/camera.html

And they provide several SVG examples here:

https://github.com/yemount/pose-animator/tree/master/resources/illustration

Unfortunately, whenever I ungrouped to edit the illustration, and then regrouped again in Inkscape, the file did not work. So all I could do was change the entire objects to the same color and call it a day.

Some details of inner workings

You can see the posenet tracking here:

Screenshot of Posenet close up — on the left, note the feature tracking in red, as well as the cyan tracking of the eyes and other points

And if you open the example SVG files, they look like this:

Under the hood: What the SVG file looks like

Further details

I haven’t run it, but the code is open-source and available here:

https://github.com/yemount/pose-animator/

I think shared my screen with OBS Studio — I just did screen share of my entire desktop, (which sort of defeats the purpose of a virtual avatar…) but obviously you can crop and resize with obs studio so that you are not in the image.

Or have more time than 30 minutes and actually install and run the software… 🙂 I’ll update if I ever do that. Or if I ever figure out how to edit the file in inkscape to create a truly custom avatar…

gas meter / electricity monitoring research

one day i want to get realtime data about our gas usage (to e.g. know how much our bad insulation, which we can’t fix due to renting, costs us)

American Meter Company AC-250 250 C.F.H. @ 1/2” diff

ITRON INC 100G DLT datalogging ERT ERG-5007-001 | 240V 3W type c1sr 30TA 1.0kh CA 0.5 FM2S 60Hz (edited)

https://www.itron.com/-/media/feature/products/documents/spec-sheet/100g-dlt-spec-sheet.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=itron+rf+meter+reader&crid=R4D0FFEQJ5JJ&sprefix=itron+rf+meter+reader%2Caps%2C85&ref=nb_sb_noss ~250

related on savings: todo: check on hepa rebate

https://www.masssave.com/en/saving/residential-rebates/dehumidifiers

Pandemic Diary #88 – whewww end-of-term + lots of travel (03 Jan 2022)

okayyyy
wow i don’t even remember when i last blogged, but some things that happened this semester:

  • passed my quals ! ! ! !!!!! !! !!!!!!
  • completed my theory class, wrote an agent-based modelling simulator for banking data
  • misc. new england travels
  • misc. roommate activities
  • a ton of end-of-year travel

misc. travel: cape cod, the new england aquarium

end of year travel: drove from boston down to GA and back (2000+ miles), saw the georgia aquarium (so cool!!!!), wandered around washington dc postal museum, then flew out and did a whole tour across the Yucatan area of Mexico to see Mayan ruins (and flamingos, and the seaside, where I got stung by jellyfish and ripped off a few times, but also lost more money losing things overall…) and visit the costco there (!). and finally spent a day or two with my cat and got the my home lasercutter running

looking forward to: maybe doing a side project? though I did take a solid 10 days off work essentially. and really getting going on my research projects (drop my expectations!), and starting a new chapter of my life post-graduation???

wow life is going to be so relaxing without teaching, classwork, and quals I hope. just internship and research. maybe i’ll have time to learn to cook, and can have my parents over for dinner instead of the other way around.

okay actually i should be trying to write most of a thesis in 62 days but yeaaaaa we’ll see !

here’s a picture of my parents riding a bike in cozumel which is a cozy island kinda near cancun (the state it’s in is more disorderly in feeling than merida)

and the traitorous dictionary entree for instant noodles… i think it’s just called sopa in spanish, or in my case i called it “maruchen” lollll