Try-out Kinect

We had fun trying out the Kinect in the Constant’s office, Rue du Fortstraat and De Pianofabriek. In the end we decided to stick with our classical surveillance camera for this project !CoLAPseKode.

One of our friends got a Kinect/X-Box for her birthday on 1-1-11. The precision with which the Kinect tracks every detail is remarkable. As Microsoft ‘allowed’ to open up the Kinect, a lot of free software developers started writing code for it, a.o. in Open Frameworks.
iMAL organised a workshop around these alternative uses of Kinect and documented it very well. Thanks iMAL! One of the participants commented he had tried to put the Kinect up at about 4m high, it was filming a surface of 6 by 8m…. Paradisiacal.
From that day onwards the idea of using a Kinect stayed with us as an option when redirecting the project in a multi-dimensional way, or in other words, when we would find reasons, time and money to re-imagine the project and above all re-writing the software. Nevertheless the Kinect had also become a fantasia-phantom, every time our tracking was distorted, weak or just capricious.

When Pierre and Dorothe commented through VOIP Kinect would be the only solution to deal with the very intense light situation in Brasil, we decided to test the beast. We could easily use the basic parameters (leaving out the depth measurements for the time being). It would need some rewriting but not that much.
Our dear friends lent us their precious toy and we did the following tests:

– in the office at short distance / distance a player would play with X-Box in a room. Superb!

– in the street on a cloudy Brussels’ day (see above), decent view at a distance of more or less 3m.

– in De Pianofabriek, our familiar spot: from the side and from the top it works perfectly in daylight & dark, but it will need a lot of work to filter out the ‘noise’ of the background