The Microsoft Kinect camera is a consumer 3D depth-sensing device. The use of a 3D camera will greatly enhance the effectiveness of body tracking. The official Microsoft SDK runs only in the Windows environment. There are, however, a few open source alternatives, that support multiple platforms, such as Mac OSX and Linux. They are as follows:
The OpenKinect software, http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page
The OpenNI software, http://www.openni.org/
For Pure Data, Matthias Kronlachner, http://www.matthiaskronlachner.com, has developed a number of external libraries that support both OpenKinect and OpenNI. The pix_freenect
object supports the use of OpenKinect driver—libfreenect
. The pix_openni
object supports the use of the OpenNI driver. A Kinect camera will give you two images, one normal RGB color image and one depth image. The depth image will provide you the depth information of each pixel in the color image. The pix_freenect
object will give you both the...