Learning computer vision through the development of a camera-trackable game controller

The trade-off between the available classroom time and the complexity of the proposed task is central to the design of any Computer Science laboratory lecture. Special care must be taken to build up an experimental setup that allows the students to get the most significant information from the experience without getting lost in the details. This is especially true when teaching Computer Vision concepts to prospective students that own little or no previous background in programming and a strongly diversified knowledge with respect to mathematics. In this chapter, the authors describe a setup for a laboratory lecture that has been administered through several years to prospective students of the Computer Science course at the University of Venice. The goal is to teach basic concepts such as color spaces or image transforms through a rewarding task, which is the development of a vision-based game controller similar in spirit to the recent human-machine interfaces adopted by the current generation of game consoles.