Kinect Hacks: Creative Coding Techniques for Motion and Pattern Detection

Create your own innovative applications in computer vision, game design, music, robotics, and other areas by taking full advantage of Kinect’s extensive interactive, multi-media platform. With this book, you get a step-by-step walkthrough of the best techniques and tools to come out of the OpenKinect project, the largest and most active Kinect hacking community.

Learn dozens of hacks for building interfaces that respond to body movements, gestures, and voice, using open source toolkits such as openFrameworks, the Processing IDE, and OpenKinect driver library. Whether you’re an artist, designer, researcher, or hobbyist, this book will give you a running start with Kinect.

• Set up a development environment in Windows 7, Mac OSX, or Ubuntu
• Build special effects apps with tools such as Synapse and Cinder
• Create gestural interfaces to integrate and control digital music components
• Capture the realistic motions of a 3D model with NI mate, Blender, and Animata
• Design gesture-based games with the ZigFu SDK
• Recreate the dimensions of any room in realtime, using RGBDemo
• Use gestures to navigate robots and control PC interfaces

Jared St. Jean lives in Toronto, Ontario and is the Application Services Manager at web.net (http://web.net/), one of the leaders in delivering open source websites and web-enabled applications to social enterprises. Jared is the founder, writer and web administrator for developkinect.com, a community driven site aimed at promoting and assisting all areas of programming and development for the Microsoft Kinect sensor. He is also a video game enthusiast who has been covering all aspects of the gaming industry for the Dashhacks Network.