I’m sure by now everyone in the world has seen some ‘hack’ involving a Microsoft Kinect and some clever programming. Microsoft’s Kinect is a computer-vision dream come true; an infrared depth sensor with impressive resolution and a standard RGB video camera. Throw in some microphones for sound capture and you have a force to be reckoned with.
Released in 2010, the Kinect was developed for the Xbox 360 with the technology and legwork done by PrimeSense who wrote the libraries and on-board processing for the vision data. However, soon after it’s release, the Kinect’s USB protocol was hacked and libraries were written for pretty much every programming language under the sun and coders got to work.
With all of the crazy possibilities that the Microsoft Kinect offers, we got a Kinect for the Palo Alto office to play around with and learn about the possibilities it offers for storytelling, prototyping, and straight-up awesome.
I wanted to give a shot at a simple program to demonstrate the basics of the Kinect for a workshop. I thought it’d be fun to make the most bare-bones interaction possible to get peoples’ brains going on the possibilities with this rich of data. The program is a demonstration of the ease of dynamically filtering moving objects based on depth and using these objects to interact with non-physical objects of our choice. You can see the grayscale depth data in the silouhetted person + couch outline in addition to the noisy outline along with some smoothed outlines. The IDEO boxes have their own physical characteristics (weight, friction, etc) and use the person + couch outlines as boundaries for interaction.
All in all, it took a whopping 2-3 hours of coding, most of which was library and driver issues at the beginning, to code this quick demo, so you get a sense of how easy it is to work with in terms of developing.
Information on how it works and links to the source code are provided after the jump.
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