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

Summary


Kinect, which is a portmanteau of the words "kinetic" and "connect", is a motion sensor developed and released by Microsoft. It provides a natural user interface (NUI) for tracking and manipulating handsfree user inputs such as gestures and skeleton motions. It can be considered as one of the most successful consumer electronics device in recent years, and we will be using this novel device to build the Fruit Ninja game in this book.

We will focus on developing Kinect and AR-based applications on Windows 7 or higher using the Microsoft Kinect SDK 1.5 (or higher) and the C++ programming language. Mainly, we have introduced how to install Kinect for Windows SDK in this chapter. Linux and Mac OS X users can first read the Appendix, Where to Go from Here, which provides an alternative method to call Kinect functionalities on other systems. Developers of .NET, processing, or other language tools may also find useful resources in the last chapter of this book.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to start and shut down the Kinect device in our applications, and prepare a basic framework for further development.