Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot

By : Nikolaus Gradwohl
Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot

By: Nikolaus Gradwohl

Overview of this book

Processing makes it convenient for developers, artists, and designers to create their own projects easily and efficiently. Processing offers you a platform for expressing your ideas and engaging audiences in new ways. This book teaches you everything you need to know to explore new frontiers in animation and interactivity with the help of Processing."Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot' will present you with nine exciting projects that will take you beyond the basics and show you how you can make your programs see, hear, and even feel! With these projects, you will also learn how to build your own hardware controllers and integrate devices such as a Kinect senor board in your Processing sketches.Processing is an exciting programming environment for programmers and visual artists alike that makes it easier to create interactive programs.Through nine complete projects, "Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot' will help you explore the exciting possibilities that this open source language provides. The topics we will cover range from creating robot - actors performing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", to generating objects for 3D printing, and you will learn how to run your processing sketches nearly anywhere from a desktop computer to a browser or a mobile device.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Processing 2: Creative Coding Hotshot
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mission Briefing


In this project, we will learn how to connect Microsoft's Kinect to a computer and use depth imaging and user tracking from Processing. We will rush through the installation of the OpenNI framework in the first task, as this library is used by the Processing library SimpleOpenNI. We will then learn how to use the depth image feature of the Kinect infrared camera and the player tracking function in Processing.

Then, we will use the so-called skeleton tracker, not only to locate the user in front of the camera, but also the head, neck, and elbows. These 3D coordinates will allow us to control a stick figure.

In the final task of our current mission, we are going to add a group of additional dancers that will also be controlled by the 3D coordinates of the players' limbs.

You can see a screenshot of the final sketch here:

Why Is It Awesome?

Kinect enables a whole lot of new possibilities for interacting with a computer. It enables the player to control a computer by simply moving...