developerWorks: Create Your Own Real-Time Visual Effects

“Real-time video effects processing is becoming more common
throughout major sporting events. NASCAR, the NFL, professional
hockey, and other sports apply real-time video effects, such as the
colored first-down line in football, based on precise geospatial
data. Advanced user interfaces and immersive environments employ
specialized input hardware to specify coordinates in a 3-D world
with six degrees of freedom. These technologies all require
investment in expensive hardware and custom data acquisition
packages. You can build your own system for real-time video effects
processing based on simple motion tracking and existing open source
software.

“EffecTV is a fantastic application written by Fukuchi Kentaro
that gives you access to the raw pixel data from a video capture
device. You can use its existing open source framework to modify
more than two dozen effects, or add your own. With the integration
of the SDL libraries, the EffecTV framework makes it easy to add
your own effects with more abstracted interfaces, making them
easier to create and integrate with existing code…”

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