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

Designing a simple pong game using skeleton tracking


We will use the output of skeleton tracking on a simple game to show you how we can use this data to make the user a bigger part of the game than he was in old times. This pong-like game is the simplest game we could think of.

Unfortunately because of the number of lines of code, we removed the How to do it... section, but you can download the source code of this recipe from Packt Publishing's website.

Also, in the How it works... section that follows, you can read information about almost every line of code.

How it works...

The gameplay is fairly simple; we have a pong-like ball that can interact with a user's skeleton. It is not a great game, but it's still a game, and it is fun enough as a mini-game from a personal perspective.

If you'll take a look at the code (the main file is OpenNI2Project.cpp), you can clearly see that we used two new #include lines. vector helps us to define arrays with dynamic-size behavior that we are going to use...