http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57561922/leap-motions-3d-motion-sensing-tech-coming-to-asus-pcs/

http://spacepalette.com/

This is an interesting use of the Kinect and was used at Burning Man. It was actually converted, prettified and demonstrated/used at Burning Man this year. I’m downloading the sourcecode now. Curiosity did not kill this cat… the use of the “frames” is pretty inspiring.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/BodyPartRecognition.pdf   The original research done by the Mirosoft Research Team at Cambridge.

From the University of Washington in St. Louis, 2 students doing research on building hand skeletons. The most interesting part of the research is the use of colored gloves to train the database for detecting the parts of the hand and the joints.

http://cse.wustl.edu/Research/Lists/Technical%20Reports/Attachments/987/Kinect%20Hand%20Recognition%20and%20Tracking.pdf 

http://cse.wustl.edu/Research/Lists/Technical%20Reports/Attachments/988/Jackoway_Project.pdf

I want this article: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2382355

Some of the MS Researchers pages:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/shahrami/

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/jamiesho/

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/cambridge/default.aspx

Not Kinect Related but interesting and worth further research:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GhNXHCQGsM

More on the Predator: http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/14/1814238/predator-outdoes-kinect-at-object-recognition

It doesn’t look like much but this is the depth data that is captured by the Kinect sensor. I did slow down the video to about 25% of the normal speed otherwise you can’t even see the numbers.

The tutorial video demonstrates a basic animation recording which could then be edited. Following are 2 tutorials, one with the Ni Mate plugin and one without Ni Mate:

This first video is the animation of a character using blender only. It’s quite lengthy.

Epic Looping Idle Animation in Blender from CG Masters on Vimeo.

And now the first tutorial presented by the Delicode team showing the use of the Ni Mate plugin. It’s a bit crude but for a first tutorial definitely shows how you could speed up 3d animation when mapped to a 3d character. I do think a combination of the animation production procedures without it and with the plugin should help 3d animators speed up their work.

Of course The Kinected Bunny that the team produced to explain their plugin does a good job showing what is possible with this software.

While I don’t think that this plugin will eliminate the necessary animation editing capabilities of the software, I do think when used in combination it will speed up the animation process.

Julius Tuomisto and Janne Karhu of Delicode have produced the Ni Mate to work with Blender for motion capture. Check them out at Ni Mate.

I started out plugging it into one of the ports on the back of my computer. Without reading all the extra information, I had the Windows Kinect SDK already installed so I figured I was good to go. Well, apparently not. The drivers installed but the Kinect Camera came back as “unplugged”. I thought WTH? How does one piece of a single plugged in hardware not get plugged in? Well apparently I didn’t realize that out of my computer’s 8 USB ports only 2 of them were USB 2.0.  Thanks to my friend Jonathan for recognizing the problem. We are both still somewhat confused as to how I have 8 USB ports and only 2 of them are Enhanced.

This wasn’t the end of my problems. After I got it plugged into the correct USB port through trial and error, I opened up the sample projects that came with the SDK. Each one I ran either crashed or hung frozen in time after 2 or 3 seconds. I had to go researching.  This time every indication was that my hardware was not good enough to run it. I went hunting for more information. Most reports implied that my graphics card was to blame. The best suggestion came in the form of a driver update for my graphics card.  I spent a little over an hour updating drivers. I tried again one last time Tuesday night. It was still freezing up. I shutdown for the night.

Lo and behold, the next morning I booted up, turned on one of the sample projects to get ready for some more searching. Ta Da everything worked as it was suppose to work. Big sighs of relief on my part. It came down to the following 2 issues:

1. Plug into an enhanced usb (usb 2.0) port.

2. Make sure all drivers are updated on your computer.

Hope you all find that useful.

Robotics : Making the machine aware

The JediBot demonstrates the use of the Kinect to give a robotic arm the ability to react to human movement. It is a bit crude and a bit slow but the idea of creating I,Robot won’t be so unimaginable with this type of experimentation and research. I was definitely impressed.  I’ve seen others using the Kinect to control a robot in videos but not one that allowed the robot to react appropriately to the outside world.

Augmented Reality: Adding to our environment

Image Control

Projection Mapping:

These videos clearly show 2 different aspects of the potential of augmented realities. In the first video, the woman is controlling the projected bird while in the second video, the man is clearly interacting with protected spheres. The idea of a 3d light object is the only thing that has not yet been invented. I would also say that whatever it is will have to be developed in a way that we aren’t all sitting in the dark for our augmented reality. Given what is currently occurring, I’d say it’s fair to make the assumption that this is not so far away.  Holodeck here we come.

NAVI: Navigational Aids for the Visually Impaired

I’m just going to say it. HOORAY!! What better use of any technology can there be than to help someone. Imagine if one day this technology can actually do more than help a blind person become aware of their surroundings via sound.  This has got to be the best use of the technology and truly thinking outside the box.

3d Reconstruction Mapping:

This pretty much shows it all. Amazing reconstruction utilizing a single Kinect then skinning the resultant 3d object. I’m not sure how much when into programming this type of application. I do have some concerns as to whether or not we’re putting a whole generation of 3d real modelers back to work in the special effects industry or changing their job descriptions.

Gesture Recognition:

This is probably the thing the Kinect is most known for- Gesture Recognition. This video showed me something I was not so sure was possible, recognition of finger joints and hands. I did see one complaint about the technology that got me thinking but this finger articulation proves that complaint is without merit. The complaint was that the user would not want to stand up to use their computer. Finger gesture recognition resolves that issue. Evoluce’s Win&I is already in release for the Kinect for Xbox for gesture recognition in Windows. There were some complaints on Amazon regarding the lack of software and drivers with the Kinect. I think they were mostly from end users who are trying to get the cutting edge which right now is the bleeding edge. The product description clearly stated that it came with no software and was released for software developers who will use it to develop new software.

Lots of innovation going on right now with this technology.  I can’t wait till I get to plug one my Kinect in and start experimenting.