Touchdesigner and MediaPipe spoutcam connection not working properly

Support
1

Hey Spout community,

CONTEXT:
Recently I have been working on a Touchdesigner (TD) project that requires hand tracking in a dark space. For this purpose I use a kinect with stereoscopic infrared vision, but kinect software is not purposefully build to track detached hands, i.e. without a full body attached as an anchor point. To solve this problem I employed MediaPipe (MP), which uses ‘webcam’ footage to track bones, including isolated hands.

The problem is that kinect infrared vision is not a ‘webcam’ stream. Thus it has to be changed to a webcam stream. MP recommends spoutcam for this purpose.

PROBLEM:
MP only receives a black screen from the spout stream. Spout diagnostics states that everything works properly. The syphonspoutout node in TD is set to 1280x720p to match the stated minimum expected by MP. Spoutsettings fps is left to 30, in case MP expect a common webcam framerate. Other settings raise an error in MP that the ‘webcam’ is not working properly.
Everything is running on a desktop. If run on my laptop, it creates a pink noise, likely due to having both integrated and standalone gpu. It used to work on a colleagues laptop, but has stopped working after reboot

If anyone has any idea on how to approach this problem, please let me know. It would be much appreciated.

Thank you for reading and have a great day,
Bas

2

Hello Bas,

The fact that it used to work on a colleagues laptop suggests a problem related to the integrated graphics.

All applications in the chain, including MediaPipe, have to use the high performance adapter. The easiest solution is to use Windows Graphics Settings to prefer high performance for each application. SpoutSettings will help to do this.

If you are using TouchDesigner with the syphonspoutout node, first check that it is received by the Spout Demo receiver. Then check that SpoutCam is received by other applications that have webcam input.

3

Hey Spout,

Thank you for the reply. My colleague has managed to get it working again on her machine. Unfortunately we did not figure out what the issue was, so we cannot be of any help if someone were to find this post again.

Bas

4

Good news. The main thing is that you have it working again. My guess is it was driver-related problem.