Hacking the Kinect

Hacking the Kinect is the technogeek’s guide to developing software and creating projects involving the groundbreaking volumetric sensor known as the Microsoft Kinect. Microsoft’s release of the Kinect in the fall of 2010 startled the technology world by providing a low-cost sensor that can detect and track body movement in three-dimensional space. The Kinect set new records for the fastest-selling gadget of all time. It has been adopted worldwide by hobbyists, robotics enthusiasts, artists, and even some entrepreneurs hoping to build business around the technology.

Hacking the Kinect introduces you to programming for the Kinect. You’ll learn to set up a software environment, stream data from the Kinect, and write code to interpret that data. The progression of hands-on projects in the book leads you even deeper into an understanding of how the device functions and how you can apply it to create fun and educational projects. Who knows? You might even come up with a business idea.

• Provides an excellent source of fun and educational projects for a tech-savvy parent to pursue with a son or daughter
• Leads you progressively from making your very first connection to the Kinect through mastery of its full feature set
• Shows how to interpret the Kinect data stream in order to drive your own software and hardware applications, including robotics applications

Jeff Kramer is a research programmer at the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu). He has been involved in robots since he was just 12 years old.