Develop Kinect

The Kinect has this unique ability to really "wow" people while simultaneously creeping them the hell out. Take for example this hack put together by some animatronic wizards over at Disney for their theme park. The goal - juggle with a robot. That's right folks, soon you'll be able to toss a ball to your favourite Disney character and have it sent back before you send the next one over.

No, this isn't an announcement for Vi Insanely Improved (wow, a vim joke, never thought I'd see the day…) but rather an announcement about a new Kinect related SDK to hit the market.

ViiM provides all functionalities of OpenNI, adding new high-level features and is packed with an assortment of great tools including 14 recognizable gestures ranging from basic wave to double click or backspace. ViiM is also able to track up to 15 skeletons while calculating individual joint positions, rotation angles, matrixes and quaternions.

If you've been following the scene for a while, I'm sure you're familiar with localization and mapping techniques using SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping). If you've seen the movie Prometheus, think of that orb they sent in that scans the entire place in a matter of hours (but a little less high tech).

Ask any developer, having a utility library available when building applications can save a you a lot of troubles. As part of a project to create gestural based character movements in second life (Armadillo); John McCaffery has developed NuiLib, a library which works with the Kinect in order to alleviate much of the heavy lifting and provide a means to ease integration of NUI devices into applications.

A very cool hackathon event is going down on October 5th and 6th at the High Tech Campus (5656 Gestel, Eindhoven, The Netherlands). Participants will pit themselves against one-another by developing a toolkit for 3D design and Print using the Wii remote, Microsoft Kinect, Leapmotion or any other innovative device, not being a traditional mouse, in 32 hours.

I really dig the end result of this hack. Using Quartz Composer and TUIO, this project dubbed "Stretchy Lines" has came to life thanks to that handy depth sensing wonder toy Kinect. The setup includes a Kinect perpendicular to the table. The TUIO Server detects objects within a specific range, and then a calibrated projector draws random lines around the objects detected.

TUIO sends objects coords using OSC protocol to Quartz Composer, and then the graphic is rendered using custom Quartz Composer patches.

Man, if Vince Carter had this type of setup in the second round of the 2001 playoffs, my beloved Raptors would have made it to the Eastern Conference finals. But alas, the Kinect wasn't around and neither was minokur who posted this rather mind blowing YouTube video.