This post will discuss an implementation of the Boids algorithm, originally developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. Its’ purpose is to mimic the flocking behaviour of a swarm of birds and as we can see when running this sample, it does a pretty good job at that. The algorithm is based on three rather simple…
Previously I talked about how to detect a pose using the Kinect. In this posting, we’ll refactor that code into a couple of reusable components that can be easily extended to create a real posing engine. Using the pattern layed out this article, any pose one can imagine (and perform…) can be defined and included…
Detecting a user’s pose with the Kinect is fairly easy. This post talks about how to do just that. The way we go about detecting a certain pose in this case is that we consider the angles between the various joints in the detected skeleton. Different poses can then be defined from various combinations of…
Since most of the generic Kinect hover button functionality is implemented in the AbstractKinectButton from here it should be extremely easy to create a regular Kinect hover button. So here it goes. Create a new Windows Game project in Visual Studio and add the reference to the Microsoft.Kinect assembly. Add the necessary using statement to…
Every once in a while I stumble upon some forum posts asking how to retrieve the player orientation from the Kinect. Although the Kinect API does not expose such a method, it is pretty easy to infer this information from the skeleton data. Some third grade math and the left and right shoulder positions will…
Here’s a neat way of scheduling tasks which should be executed in a certain order. It’s called topological sorting and resolves ordering of nodes based on the edges between the nodes. Please see the graph below. An arrow (edge) pointing from one object (node) at another means “is dependent on”. In this case, the far…
To make a Kinect hover check button have any use in a real world application or game, it should provide an animation of some sort to show the user that he or she is about to select an option, menu item or action. Let’s create an animation and add it to the refactored Kinect check…
In this previous post we learned how to implement a Kinect check box. However, the given implementation is not suitable for use in a real-world application or game. In this post we’ll fix this issue by refactoring the KinectCheckBox code into a robust, reusable and extensible component. First, we create a new Windows Game project…
In this post I’ll be talking about creating a Kinect check box which the user can check and uncheck by hovering over it for a certain amount of time. The check box uses two assets, a checked image and an unchecked image. It has a position, a “hot area” and a state and responds to…
The KinectSDK’s skeleton tracking API allows an application to track the users joints in front of the Kinect camera. In this post we’ll see how to do just that, using the XNA 4.0 framework. Of course we do need Microsoft’s XNA GameStudio and the Kinect development kit installed on our system. They are available here…