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

Chapter 4. Skeletal Motion and Face Tracking

Capturing and tracking skeleton images of one or two people is one of the most exciting features of Kinect development. It can transform many ideas to reality, including gesture recognition, multi-touch emulation, data-driven character animations, and even some advanced techniques such as motion capture and model reconstruction. The skeletal mapping work in every Kinect device is actually done by a microprocessor in the sensor (or directly by the Xbox core), and the results can be retrieved using corresponding APIs for use in our own applications.

The Microsoft Kinect SDK 1.5 also includes a new face tracking module that can track the position and rotation of our heads, and the shapes of our eyes and mouth. It even provides APIs to compute a virtual face mesh, which can be directly rendered in the 3D world. We will also introduce these excellent functionalities in this chapter, although they are not quite related to our planned Fruit Ninja game...