# MediaPipe Hand/Pose as Input

**Track:** Creative ML & AI-in-the-Loop — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Medium
**Prerequisites:** Mouse Input & Events, Vectors: Magnitude & Direction

**In one line:** Body and hand landmarks as a live controller.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Google's MediaPipe regresses a skeleton from ordinary video: twenty-one normalized keypoints per hand, thirty-three across the body, tracked frame by frame on commodity hardware. Treated as a controller, these coordinates turn the body into an instrument—pinch distance mapped to scale, wrist velocity to turbulence, posture to palette. The theory is cheap, robust landmark regression; the craft is the mapping, where a number acquires the feel of a gesture. The idea predates the model: Myron Krueger's "Videoplace" (1970s) and the Theremin already made the moving body a continuous parameter. ml5.js wraps handpose and pose models in the same friendly grammar, lowering the threshold from research demo to sketch.