White Glove Tracking

by Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth
http://whiteglovetracking.com/

There are 10,060 frames in the video in Michael Jackson's 5 min 35 sec nationally-televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. The White Glove Tracking project (W.G.T.) is an effort to isolate just the white glove from this moment in pop-culture history. Rather then write unnecessarily complex code to find the glove in every frame of the video I am asking for the assistance of 10,060 individual internet users to simply click and drag a box around the glove in one frame. This follows the principle that useful data can be gathered by asking internet users to perform "...tasks that require human perception and common sense, but may not require a lot of scientific training" (NASA). In the end this data will be shared freely for all to download, visualize, and use as an input into other digital systems.

Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth Bios
Ben Engebreth comes to Eyebeam from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech where he worked on trajectory optimization for spacecraft. Before JPL, Ben received a masters of science in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado. Ben has recently begun applying his programming and data analysis skills to the development of socially beneficial web projects including the carpool site Pooln and Housing Tracker.

Evan Roth is a research and development fellow at Eyebeam, where his work focuses on artistic uses of technology in popular culture and the urban environment. He received a MFA from the Design Technology Department at Parsons, where he now teaches. Past and present projects are found at ni9e.com.