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

Preparing the development environment


Before we create a new console project in Visual Studio, we are first going to download some third-party dependencies for convenience; otherwise we will have to implement the construction of the OpenGL context completely by ourselves, and some important but complex functionality such as image reading and displaying. To make this process less lengthy, we will choose only two external libraries here:

  • FreeGLUT

  • FreeImage

Both of them are open source and easy to understand.

External libraries will be used as dependencies for each of our C++ projects, so we can make use of the OpenGL-based drawing and image loading functions, which are important for future work.

FreeGLUT is a complete alternative to the famous OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT), allowing developers to create and manage OpenGL contexts with just a few functions and readable callbacks. Its official website is:

http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/

But, we can directly download the prebuilt Windows package...