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

Sending cursors to external applications


In the last example of this chapter, we are going to make some use of the cursors we obtained from the skeleton data. As there are many other applications developed with only the mouse and keyboard as main input devices, it is sometimes meaningful to synthesize keyboard inputs, mouse motions, and button clicks, and send them to these applications for the purpose of providing more interaction methods.

A cool example, which we will be implementing here, is to convert the cursor data from Kinect to Windows mouse information so that we can use motion-sense techniques to control common operation systems. Other useful ideas include converting the cursors to the TUIO protocol (a unified framework for tangible multitouch surfaces) and use them for remote controls, or communicating with some famous multimedia software such as VVVV and Max/MSP.

Emulating Windows mouse with cursors

This recipe will be slightly different from the previous ones. It won't render anything...