1. Hacking the Kinect for good and/or evil (mostly good) Pierre Baillargeon (@Kabong) February 5, 2011
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5. Why did you do this? Needed something to update the robotics display for third annual Scripps science education day. How can we get kids excited about science and engineering? What can I build in one week?
10. Where can I go to learn more? Jiggywatts.com (source code and presentation posted on my blog): http:// www.jiggywatts.com / Wired: “How Motion Detection works in Xbox Kinect” - http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/11/tonights-release-xbox-kinect-how-does-it-work/ OpenKinect Drivers – http:// www.openkinect.org / OpenNI (PrimeSense backed) Drivers – http:// www.openni.org / OpenFrameworks Forums (tons of great Kinect demos) - http:// www.openframeworks.cc /forum/
Editor's Notes
Show of hands, who has done any image or video processing programming? Did you have fun trying to get the lighting right? Did you enjoy writing morphological operators to locate and track objects? The PrimeSense library takes care of all of that. It works in a room with bright lights, a room with no lights. You don’t write any code to track players, you just access the player object and ask for the spatial coordinates of the player’s joints. If you would rather roll your own toolset, you still have a headstart with the depth camera
It is important to point out here that there are two flavors of Kinect open source programming right now: OpenKinect (result of the original Adafruit contest) and OpenNI/NITE (result of PrimeSense making their driver and middleware available). The OpenKinect drivers are very basic and allow you to access the raw data coming from the IR and RGB cameras (also allows motor control). The OpenNI/NITE tools allow the same, plus they add a layer of abstraction where you can deal directly with player data instead of the IR/RGB feeds. OpenNI/NITE does not allow motor control currently.
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