There has been some design changes to the mural portion of our exhibit involving the Kinect and so I have been doing some research into it. For the new design, we do not want users to interact through body gestures. Instead, we want users to be able to use their hands to control a cursor that can be the interaction between them and the mural. Therefore I have been researching Kinect cursor control and also began creating a prototype of my own.
Through my research (and also fellow team member Jordan’s research), I was able to compile some relevant projects that may be of use to what we want to do with our Kinect cursor control. Below are those projects:
- Kinect v2 Mouse Control by Tango Chen
- Kinect Cursor Control by Beginner258
- Kinect Nite Dev by Mike Hodnick
- Kinect Cursor for Hand Tracking by Vangos Pterneas
The project that was the most helpful was Vangos Pterneas’s project as it was the one that made the most sense to reference. I downloaded his project from GitHub and started to build off of his source code. Much of the code for Kinect projects are outdated so I had to make a few changes to some of the assemblies and references in Pterneas’s code to get the project to actually start and run without errors.
How it works:
- when launched, there is a window with a hand svg
- when the Kinect detects a user’s hand, the svg will follow the movement of that user’s hand
- the Kinect will be able to detect the hand that is closest to the sensor and thus track that hand
There are still bugs with the prototype as I cannot get the Kinect to sense a user yet. The project is built in Visual Studio and uses C# so I am still unfamiliar with it and need a bit more time to develop. I contacted Professor Diefenbach for help last week but I did not get a response, so I will contact him again this week and hopefully he would be able to help with debugging my prototype.
