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Gesture recognition and interactive animation using Kinect

Sofia_hkiSofia_hki
edited October 2016 in Kinect

Hi all,

I am planning to make an interactive installation / video wall as a graduation project but I’m complete noob in programming. My idea is to make e.g. 4 different animations with After Effects and use them in an interactive installation that allows people to influence which animation plays using Kinect and gesture recognition. I’m wondering if I should buy Kinect 1 or 2? I know the basics of Processing but should I look into Processing or OpenFrameworks with this project? Also I would be extremely grateful for all kinds of tips on where to start! Thanks!

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Answers

  • rojelerojele

    Hi, Sofia,

    I dont really know your programming level, so maybe working in processing should be useful. first of all is important to know in which platform you are going to work. Here I send you a link to installation of simple openni in mac, el capitan. Dued to the fact that openni is not opensource anymore, i think apple has bought it, you may have some problems for installing but for me, that link that I passed to you worked. If you want to work in windows, it can be useful for you to install the kinect sdk and test it. Which kind of interactions are you pretending of the people with the animations?

  • jeremydouglassjeremydouglass

    @Sofia_hki -- when you say a video wall, do you mean projection from a single computer, or is it a custom multi-screen wall, and are the screens run by one computer or many separate computers? If a wall, the first thing you eat to find out is what kinds of programs you can run on it -- that will determine whether processing will work or not.

    Also, how big (pixel dimensions) is the thing you are trying to create? Processing will be much easier to program for a new coder, but OpenFrameworks will (in general) give you better performance if you are pushing lots of pixels around.

  • Sofia_hkiSofia_hki

    @rojele Thank you for your answer! I'd prefer working in OS X but I have also Windows in my Mac (bootcamp) if that makes things easier. I bought Kinect Xbox One with an adapter and now I'm trying to figure out if I should install it using Windows or OS X. What do you think would work better with Processing / OpenFrameworks? I'm still working on my concept but at the moment the idea is to use a person's (moving) silhouette as a mask for the animation and then somehow with hand gestures interact with the contents of the animation eg. change between 4 different image sequences.

  • Sofia_hkiSofia_hki

    @jeremydouglass Thank you so much for your help! The idea would be to make a projection using one single laptop. The size would be something around a full size mirror and I'm planning to use 3d elements and animation in a video format or as an image sequence made with After Effects / Cinema 4d.

  • jeremydouglassjeremydouglass
  • rojelerojele

    Hi, Sofia,

    if you feel confortable in mac, perfect, work in mac. In my previous message I sent you a link for the installation of all openni requirements in mac, so, please, take your time to complete the steps. You need to install xcode, that sure you have already.

    As Jeremy said, its easier to begin with processing. For the part of the silhouette as a mask, you really dont need simple openni, with openkinect you can get it perfectly. As you said, use the pixels inside the silhouette for showing the content of what you want. But when we are talking about hand recognition, here is when you need something more potent, like simpleopenni. About interaction with content, mmmm.. maybe you can establish a movement route. For example: if the position of left hand is up and right hand is down and hips are moving, do the following… It’s just an idea. Or check speed movement calculating the distance between the same node vector in two correlative frames, etc etc Have this helped you?

  • Sofia_hkiSofia_hki

    Thank you for your advice @jeremydouglass and @rojele! I finally had the time to follow the steps in the installation guide for Mac and all the stages seemed to be completed successfully. However, in the end when trying to run the examples I got the message: Device: PrimeSense/SensorKinect/5.1.2.1: The device is not connected! Everything is connected and I can see the white light on in Kinect. Any ideas? I have Kinect 1520 and MacOS Sierra.

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