Have to Start Somewhere

Kevin MohammedKevin Mohammed
2 min read

Sometime in January to March of 2025, I saw a video of this guy who manipulated music output based on his hand movement. I thought that was intriguing, and I knew I could replicate something similar (and better, duh). But I had no knowledge or idea of where even to start.

Months later, I wanted to do a Computer Vision (CV) project, but I had never done a proper tutorial. In late May 2025, on the way to Indiana for the Indy-500, I was determined to do a small tutorial to get some knowledge under my belt, so I watched and did a 2-hour tutorial.

As I was getting bored with the tutorial, I was ready to just start the hands-on process. The next couple of months, I got packed with work, socializing, and laziness, so I forgot about the tutorial and the framework I had already built out.

This was the tutorial, I only watched like 2 hours or so to understand the hand movements:

Key facts to know going forward would be:

  • The mediapipe library creates 21 markings on the hands that are detected.

    • Palm: 0

    • Thumb: 1-4

    • Index: 5-8

    • Middle: 9-12

    • Ring: 13-16

    • Pinky: 17-20

      It would look something like this:

          4   8   12   16   20
           3  7   11   15   19
            2  6  10   14  18
             1  5  9  13  17
                   0
      

July 23rd, I decided to finally cut the crap and start building this out. So I reread the code I already wrote out and started by drawing a line from the left hand and right hand that are connected at the palm (0).

I might start referring to each point by just the number, so keep up.

With the line drawn, I wanted to find the distance, which I did so with the basic dist = sqrt(x² +y²) (Thank you, Mrs. Kaplan and Brown)

I’ll make another blog page sometime to give the other updates.

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Kevin Mohammed
Kevin Mohammed