Ubuntu Kinect Mouse Control

Published by admin on Mon, 05/12/2011 - 5:30pm

I came across this easy to set up mouse control Kinect hack for Ubuntu. From what I can tell, you can't execute any "click" commands so it isn't the most practical hack out there. It may however prove to be a good jumping off point if you were interested in developing a Minority Report type interface for Ubuntu.

Installing Dependencies

First up, you'll need to add the PPA for Freenect. Open a Terminal and type the following in:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:arne-alamut/freenect

Resynchronize the package list

sudo apt-get update

Now for the rest.

sudo apt-get install freenect libncurses5-dev freeglut3-dev libX11-dev libxtst-dev libxmu-dev cmake git

Building Kinect Mouse

Create a 'Kinect' directory some place that you can access easily and use git to download the latest version of Kinect-Mouse

mkdir ~/Kinect
cd ~/Kinect
sudo git clone https://github.com/Ooblik/Kinect-Mouse.git

Create a build directory within Kinect-Mouse and run make to install it

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Plug your Kinect into a USB port - and also make sure the Kinect is plugged into a power outlet - and run kmouse

sudo ./kmouse

Make sure you're situated at a distance where your body appears in white but your hand is red. This is the Kinect Mouse "Sweet Spot" if you will. You'll notice that as soon as you're calibrated properly, your mouse cursor will begin to move with your hand.