Self Portrait

Playing around with the Kinect Scanner, adding DOF, polygonization and stains …
Rendered with 3dsmax.

Kinect OpenCL 3D Scan

I gave a shot at scanning my friend using a Kinect-based openCL scanner,
which was also a good opportunity to test our new PC laptop (wtf?!) sporting a roaring Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M 3 Go GDDR5.
This gfx card simply buries my macbook’s AMD Radeon HD 6750M …

AAPL: it’s about time to bundle some serious gear in your laptops.

Here’s the resulting meshed point cloud, at 250K+ vertices :

MAD_KinectMasker tutorial

EDIT: this tutorial is now depreciated, as MadMapper supports QuartzComposer files natively.
We offer the original QC patch for free to anyone, get it from
MadMapper forum

In this tutorial, will use the newly released MAD_Lab applications
to plug a Kinect to your Mac and do so realtime masking… !

So first, launch MAD_KinectMasker application.
This app. uses the v002 OpenKinect plugin (bundled into the app) kindly provided by v002 team and the Syphon plugin.

MadMapping Workshop #1

Day 01.
All participants arrived.
Mini-face-mapping unit deployed.
Faces scanned and mapped.
Using a Kinect to extract faces from background, pictures sent back to Modul8, mapped with MadMapper.

Make The Line Dance / Video

Video report of an Augmented Dance session test.
I finally managed to reduce the latency a bit, perceptually at least.
Using a Kinect for skeleton tracking,
QC to render the lines (+1024_ParticleWarfare + 1024_Rope + 1024_Skeleton),
MadMapper (+Syphon) to match video and real action,
MaxForLive for the randomly generated piano sounds.
And a Canon 5D SLR for the shooting.

Hardware latency

As kindly pointed by master Memo, I tested my hardware latency.

First photo is the projector latency: displaying the same timecode on both computer screen and the projector, in this case an Optoma EP759.
On top the proector timecode, bottom the computer timecode:

Result is a 16ms latency. 1 frame at 60FPS.

Now testing the Kinect unit. Same procedure. Note that I’m using v002_OpenKinect QC plugin by Vade to display the Kinect Color Image.
On top the computer timecode, on the bottom the Kinect grabbed timecode:

Result is an amazing 80ms latency !

Each test was repeated 3 times in order to have consistent results.
So with this setup I have an overall 6 frame delay (roughly).
I guess you can’t expect more from a 150euros plastic consumer product.
And it also confirms my gaming impressions on the Xbox.

Since the Kinect is grabbing frames -apparently- at 30FPS, I’ll lock my output to 30FPS as well, and hopefully reduce the latency to 3 frames…
I’d be happy if anyone can confirm these tests.

Make the line dance

Yet another experimentation with a Kinect unit, Skeleton recognition and video mapping.
The system is working so far, but there’s an annoying one frame delay that forces to move slowly. Video in the making.

Line Dancing

Remember the PSone game called Vib Ribbon (by Masaya Matsuura) ?
It is one of my fav’ all-time game.
Pure and minimal, just white, much better than Rez.

Well, this is the same, audio reactive line craziness, with a Kinect instead.
Time to put some music and dance.
This is obviously the beginning of a new project (and a new plugin) …

More Kinect phun

Some more K-fun today.
I’ll probably be using this for the BoomBox in April.
Currently rendering lines between each 3d point, add some simplex noise and a glow post-fx.

_1024_KinectPrimitivePoint QCplugin

So you’ve ordered a Kinect for Xmas. How original ! Maybe it is about time to check this _1024_KinectPrimitivePoint experimental QCplugin. It will actually convert a Depth image into a vertex array of GLpoints. The kewl thing is that you have a few options to fiddle with Z amplitude, offset, and of course Zmin/Zmax, so you won’t have to bother with filtering your image in the first place.
Example included, note that you don’t have to own a Kinect or even install the KnM Kinect plugin (which is damn cool btw) for the example to run.
Plugin is still experimental, and a bit slow, but has an extra option to add some noise to your 3d points. Great to dissolve the data in a chaotic way.
10.5/10.6 universal. Download from the box.