Book Image

OpenNI Cookbook

By : Soroush Falahati
Book Image

OpenNI Cookbook

By: Soroush Falahati

Overview of this book

The release of Microsoft Kinect, then PrimeSense Sensor, and Asus Xtion opened new doors for developers to interact with users, re-design their application’s UI, and make them environment (context) aware. For this purpose, developers need a good framework which provides a complete application programming interface (API), and OpenNI is the first choice in this field. This book introduces the new version of OpenNI. "OpenNI Cookbook" will show you how to start developing a Natural Interaction UI for your applications or games with high level APIs and at the same time access RAW data from different sensors of different hardware supported by OpenNI using low level APIs. It also deals with expanding OpenNI by writing new modules and expanding applications using different OpenNI compatible middleware, including NITE. "OpenNI Cookbook" favors practical examples over plain theory, giving you a more hands-on experience to help you learn. OpenNI Cookbook starts with information about installing devices and retrieving RAW data from them, and then shows how to use this data in applications. You will learn how to access a device or how to read data from it and show them using OpenGL, or use middleware (especially NITE) to track and recognize users, hands, and guess the skeleton of a person in front of a device, all through examples.You also learn about more advanced aspects such as how to write a simple module or middleware for OpenNI itself. "OpenNI Cookbook" shows you how to start and experiment with both NIUI designs and OpenNI itself using examples.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
OpenNI Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


The most important feature of NiTE is recognizing a user's skeleton structure and giving developers the approximate position of each joint. In this chapter, we are going to cover this topic in the first two recipes. Then we will show you how to use this data to create a simple, pong-like game.

The nite::UserTracker object

We already talked about nite::UserTracker in Chapter 5, NiTE and User Tracking. In this chapter, we will introduce some of the other methods of this class that are going to be used.

A list of the most important methods of this class is as follows:

  • nite::UserTracker::startPoseDetection(): This method starts searching for a specific pose of a specific user. If you want to search for more than one pose for a user, you can simply call this method multiple times with different arguments.

  • nite::UserTracker::startSkeletonTracking(): This method starts the process of recognizing the position and orientation of the skeleton joints of a specific user.

  • nite::UserTracker...