0007 · FALCOARIA

In falconry the falcon perches on the glove of the left hand; the right stays free for the lure. Here your left hand, in front of the webcam, is the glove: the hand's height in the frame is the bird's altitude, a pinch is one wingbeat and a closed fist is the stoop. The bird doesn't obey: it flies where the hand points with the energy it has, and the cube measures the whole flight.

piece

0007 · FALCOARIA · 2026-10-01 · real time · interactive, with webcam

technique

MediaPipe Hand Landmarker hand tracking, 21 points, running on your computer (the video never leaves the browser); gestures measured on the hand itself — pinch by thumb–index distance over palm size, with hysteresis; fist by four curled fingers over three readings in a row; palm height in the video frame → altitude; point-mass flight model at a fixed 60 Hz step: lifting-line lift (CLα = 2π·AR/(AR+2)), parasite + induced drag, stall above CLmax, thrust only on the downstroke, a stoop with folded wings trading height for speed and aiming at the lure, pull-out limited by load; downwash ε = 2·CL/(π·AR) and tip vortices with Γ = L/(ρ·V·b); wireframe falcon from the same .glb as HORUS, skinned on the CPU; in-house rasterizer on a 2D canvas, no WebGL; four camera angles with hard cuts (3/4, side, front, top), AUTO cycling through them free orbit by dragging and mouse-wheel zoom; the bird toggles between cyan wireframe and a solid surface on the warm table (z-buffer, Bayer 4×4) — projections and plots always go to the back walls; AR mode in Three.js r160: the raw camera as backdrop (a declared exception to W3 — there the camera is the world, not an image of work), neon green and cyan palette, Cp on the bird's surface, streamlines and a pressure slice computed from a bound vortex with Γ = L/(ρ·V·b) (Kutta–Joukowski), tip vortices and downwash, Bernoulli pressure Cp = 1 − (u/V)², the trail coloured by speed; an optional video filter as a thermal camera (luminance on the same heat map, displaced by noise and by the luminance itself, cyan edges); in AR the other hand (the right) is a clutch zoom: a closed fist engages and distance to the camera zooms in or out, an open hand locks it

buffer

426×240 landscape, 216×384 portrait (W2) · 16 colours · 3D at 15 fps, HUD at 30 · webcam reduced to 64×48 and quantized to the cool table with Bayer 4×4 (W3) · the bird is drawn 26× in a 120 × 100 × 60 m cube, width and height adjustable from 40 to 240 m

time

real time · without a camera, the demo flies itself as a function of the simulation clock: run it again and the same flight comes out

inputs

falcon mesh (.glb, the same as HORUS) · glove: Rigged Lowpoly Hand (Janosch, Sketchfab, CC-BY 4.0), 808 triangles and 21 joints with the author's weights, posed by MediaPipe's 21 points; switched off, the hand becomes the 21 joints and the pinch vector with the distance that triggers the wingbeat · MediaPipe Tasks Vision 1.0.1 and hand_landmarker.task (Google, Apache 2.0), vendored · bird: female peregrine falcon, 0.9 kg, 1.0 m span, 0.12 m² wing area, CD0 0.05, e 0.8, CLmax 1.4 [measure] · stoop drag area 0.0019 m², calibrated to a 320 km/h terminal speed [measure] · wingbeat thrust (1.2 weights peak over 0.25 s) and a 10 g load limit, modelled [measure]

licence

code MIT · piece CC BY-NC 4.0 · MediaPipe Apache 2.0 · Three.js MIT · glove CC-BY 4.0 (Janosch) · signed by Nilo River