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


In the previous chapter, we learned how to initialize sensors and configure their output in the way we want. In this chapter, we will introduce ways to read this data and show it to the user.

This chapter is not about advanced or high-level (middleware) outputs. For now, we are going to talk only about native OpenNI outputs: color, IR, and depth.

But before anything, we need to know about some of OpenNI's related classes.

VideoFrameRef object

Unlike the OpenNI 1.x era, where there were different classes for reading frames of data from sensors, known as MetaData types, here we have only one class to read data from any sensor, called openni::VideoFrameRef. This is just as in the previous chapter, where we had the openni::VideoStream class for accessing different sensors instead of one Generator class per sensor.

But let's forget about OpenNI 1.x. We are here to talk about OpenNI 2.x. In OpenNI 2.x, you don't need different classes to access frames; the only thing you need is the...