Book Image

Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide

By : Abhijit Jana
Book Image

Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide

By: Abhijit Jana

Overview of this book

Kinect has been a game-changer in the world of motion games and applications since its first release. It has been touted as a controller for Microsoft Xbox but is much more than that. The developer version of Kinect, Kinect for Windows SDK, provides developers with the tools to develop applications that run on Windows. You can use this to develop applications that make interaction with your computer hands-free. This book focuses on developing applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK. It is a complete end to end solution using different features of Kinect for Windows SDK with step by step guidance. The book will also help you develop motion sensitive and speech recognition enabled applications. You will also learn about building application using multiple Kinects.The book begins with explaining the different components of Kinect and then moves into to the setting up the device and getting thedevelopment environment ready. You will be surprised at how quickly the book takes you through the details of Kinect APIs. You will use NUI to use the Kinect for Natural Inputs like skeleton tracking, sensing, speech recognizing. You will capture different types of stream, and images, handle stream event, and capture frame. Kinect device contains a motorized tilt to control sensor angles, you will learn how to adjust it automatically. The last part of the book teaches you how to build application using multiple Kinects and discuss how Kinect can be used to integrate with other devices such as Windows Phone and microcontroller.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Taking Kinect to the Cloud


When you take Kinect to the Cloud, the sky is the limit for making applications. In this section we will discuss how to design a very simple application that can upload image frames to the Cloud using Windows Azure.

Required components

To build this solution, we will be using the following technologies:

  • Windows Azure

  • Windows Azure SDK

  • Kinect device and the Kinect for Windows SDK

The following diagram shows the overall application design. This diagram describes how the Kinect device is connected with Windows Azure Storage via the Kinect for Windows SDK and Windows Azure SDK:

Windows Azure

We will use Windows Azure cloud storage for read/write operations of the image streams. Windows Azure storage has Blobs, Tables and Queues.

Blobs are used for storing larger files, which can be uploaded or downloaded as chunks called a blob. As of today, blobs allow you to store files up to 1 TB.

Tables should not be confused with the SQL Azure tables. The Azure storage table is similar...