Code Confessions

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking about the Kinect for the fifth time, this time at the North Dallas .NET User Group. NDDNUG is a great group. Even with it pouring outside, we had a decent turnout.

This was the first time since the 1.0 release I’ve presented on it.  What I didn’t expect was how much shorter my presentation was due to how much work has gone into simplifying the .NET Kinect development experience.  Bit twiddling on depth, MTA’s, DMOs, and much more are just gone from the experience.  The team deserves some serious kudos for this.

A couple people asked me about slides and code. Code is available on bitbucket. 

I’m happy to announce I’ll be speaking at NDDNUG (The North Dallas .NET User Group) on Kinect development on June 6th next month. The timing is auspicious. Microsoft hinted that that the Kinect 1.5 SDK was going to release toward the end of month and it’s here and there’s some great new stuff. Here’s what excited to me:

• Face Tracking. This is huge for those trying to do animated films on the cheap. This will map a person’s eyebrows, mouth position and more onto a 3D mesh. You smile and your puppet self will smile.
• Kinect Studio. Record and playback of Kinect data (No more jumping up and down just to write software.. though this was great exercise). This is going to make debugging key scenarios much easier.
• Seated skeletal tracking. Seated skeletons will no longer dissolve into painful yoga poses.
• Joint Orientation. The Kinect can tell you about rotated joints such as the rotation of the wrist. Good for playing twister and revving virtual motorcycles!
• Improved green screen effect (mapping RGB to depth) most noticeable in the speed of tracking (from about 10ms to 2ms), though it still comes with a halo of noise.
• Additional languages for speech recognition.

For new users and old, the quality of the Kinect developer samples and especially the Kinect Explorer (the key sample application to demonstrate Kinect features) have been greatly improved. Also released is a well written Human Interface Guidelines document. This 70 page PDF gives insight into good Kinect HCI for both audio and kinetic inputs. It also lends a domain language with which to discuss Kinect. What the guide doesn’t do is give technical details on how to develop gestures.

Developers are still hoping a gesture recognition and possibly a facial recognition SDK are in the works, but there isn’t a clear indication if these are in the works.

I had the pleasure of presenting the expanded version of my “Connect with your Kinect” presentation at both the C# Special Interest Group and the Ft Worth .NET User Group this month.   I’ve really been enjoying both speaking on Kinect and developing with the peripheral.  I promised code and slides so here they are!

The code can be pulled from BitBucket here. Slides are available here

I also just learned I get to do this one more time at SMU. The SMU Computer Science Department has invited me to give the talk again on Oct 27th to students.  The talk is open to everyone so if you are interested in attending look here for more information later this month.

I had a lot of fun at Dallas TechFest this year as both a speaker and a participant.  This was my first year to speak at Dallas TechFest and I was both humbled and honored to be selected.  Much thanks to the event organizers for putting together such an excellent event.

I find Techfest exciting for many reasons, one of which is that it takes place at the University of Texas at Dallas.   Due to this my audience was a mix of personalities from freshman students to PhDs to professional developers. 

The code focused talk I gave was entitled “Connect with your Kinect”.  On a technical level the talk demoed broad API functionality found in the beta SDK of Microsoft Kinect.  On a deeper level I sought to inspire developers on the potential of this device and get their interests perked.

I was happy with the reaction to this talk.  I think the audience left enthused and I felt some real energy in the room.

I promised to post some code here, but I have been asked to expand the talk and give it again at the Dallas C# SIG group in about two weeks.  Because of this, I’m going to do some code cleanup and post it shortly there after.  Stay tuned!