So we finally got a Kinect camera hooked up to a pc at work and, while it doesn’t seem to be legal to use it for commercial projects (but, hey, I’m no lawyer), the boss asked me to get it figured out and come up with some ideas just in case it would be feasible to use in the future.
So, my first go: A Kinect Beach Ball Party. You can see the video of it below.
Technically speaking, this is using Flash, Box2D, and OpenNI for Kinect integration.
NOTE: there seem to be two distinct paths to follow if you want to delve into the world of Kinect and PC – OpenNI and OpenKinect. It’s a shame that someone smarter than myself doesn’t merge the two as there are capabilities of each I’d like to use. For example, I love being able to get the skeleton data with OpenNI, but I’d also like access to the regular RGB image data that you can get with OpenKinect. Ah well. Only been at it now for a day – I’m sure there’s something I’m overlooking.
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Yes, this is what I get paid to do…
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very nice. awesome you get paid for it too!
Is there a big lag? It seems like your reactions are slow, and that would explain it.
“…it doesn’t seem to be legal to use it for commercial projects…”
Why’s that then?
@Evan There is actually very little lag – the app runs at a constant 31 FPS. I think the reason for the slowness is a. as good as Box2D is, it isn’t real physics. When using a mouse, that’s not a big deal, but when you’re actually moving your body around, it’s much more noticeable. I think the real problem though is the video itself. I use a free screen capture app that encodes to avi that I then resize, rescale and recode to flv, so the video is much more laggy than the actual app.
@Adam, I don’t want to get into any legal discussions because I won’t pretend for a moment to actually know what I’m talking about, but I doubt that Microsoft would be all that willing to let someone use a Kinect camera in a commercial project at this point. Again, I may be totally wrong, but officially speaking, the Kinect doesn’t even work on a pc yet – though MS is working on that: http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-preparing-official-kinect-drivers-and-sdk-for-windows/
Haha that’s awesome, looks like fun! I knew processing, openframeworks and such could be used with Kinect, but had no idea you could also use it with flash, which is great. Looking forward for some more.