Fingers Are For Burning

The experiment started with Mediapipe's hand tracking, which gives you 21 landmark points per hand in real time. Rather than using those points for gesture recognition, I wanted to see what happened if I treated the hand as a heat source.

I built a feedback system where each tracked point emits a heat value that bleeds outward across a feedback texture, accumulating over time the way thermal radiation does. The faster the hand moves, the more heat gets deposited. Hold still and it dissipates. The challenge was getting the feedback loop to feel physically plausible rather than just visually noisy. Dialling that in meant understanding how feedback textures accumulate and decay in TouchDesigner at a level I hadn't needed before.