Book Image

Augmented Reality with Kinect

By : Rui Wang
Book Image

Augmented Reality with Kinect

By: Rui Wang

Overview of this book

Microsoft Kinect changes the notion of user interface design. It differs from most other user input controllers as it enables users to interact with the program without touching the mouse or a trackpad. It utilizes motion sensing technology and all it needs is a real-time cameras, tracked skeletons, and gestures. Augmented Reality with Kinect will help you get into the world of Microsoft Kinect programming with the C/C++ language. The book will cover the installation, image streaming, skeleton and face tracking, multi-touch cursors and gesture emulation. Finally, you will end up with a complete Kinect-based game. Augmented Reality with Kinect will help you get into the world of Kinect programming, with a few interesting recipes and a relatively complete example. The book will introduce the following topics: the installation and initialization of Kinect applications; capturing color and depth images; obtaining skeleton and face tracking data; emulating multi-touch cursors and gestures; and developing a complete game using Kinect features. The book is divided in such a way so as to ensure that each topic is given the right amount of focus. Beginners will start from the first chapter and build up to developing their own applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Augmented Reality with Kinect
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Creating Your First Program

We have already introduced how to install the Kinect device on Windows in the previous chapter, as well as some official examples showing the basic concepts of Kinect programming. In this chapter, we will prepare a simple OpenGL framework for our Kinect-based game using the C++ language. OpenGL is a well-rounded and evolving cross-platform API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics. It supports multiple languages including C/C++, Java, Python, and C#. As we are working on an Augmented Reality (AR) project, which must consist of the view of the real world and some virtual elements, OpenGL will be a good choice here because of its hardware-accelerated features and popularity all over the world.

Tip

As you may know, Microsoft's DirectX is another reliable 2D/3D graphics API that could fit our requirements. But it is only used under Windows currently, and can hardly support languages except C/C++ and C#. You can learn more about DirectX at:

http://msdn.microsoft...