Posted on June 27, 2011 by Adam Amaral

I’ve been seeing a bunch of cool stuff done with the microsoft kinect, outside of gaming, so I finally got one for myself to start hacking. In June Microsoft released an official SDK beta for the kinect. I first tried my hacking with the SDK and while there is some documentation on getting started with getting simple depth data or skeletal data out of the kinect, it seemed to lack some experimental examples that a beginner could work off of. After doing some research I decided to try out an open source library from openkinect.org. Besides OpenNI from primsense (another library/drivers that I haven’t tried) openkinect seems pretty popular with the hacking community. After going through their example codes and playing around, I really liked the point cloud, created using depth data from the kinect. So I decided to make a trippy/glitchy ass video (above).

I quickly realized that my c++/c# knowledge is non-existent so I did more research… trying to bring the kinect data to something I’m a little more familiar with.  Thanks to Hardik Pandya I found a great processing library for the Kinect. Once I got it working, I was able to use javascript to hack the kinect.  Since I’ve got a little web dev knowledge the javascript was much easier to understand than the previous c++/c#.  Soooooooo, thats where I am now, I got a lot more to learn.  Hopefully more experiments coming soon.