Synapse for Kinect

How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect | Gadget Lab The prototype for Microsoft’s Kinect camera and microphone famously cost $30,000. At midnight Thursday morning, you’ll be able to buy it for $150 as an Xbox 360 peripheral. Microsoft is projecting that it will sell 5 million units between now and Christmas. Kinect’s camera is powered by both hardware and software. Older software programs used differences in color and texture to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. Time-of-flight works like sonar: If you know how long the light takes to return, you know how far away an object is. Using an infrared generator also partially solves the problem of ambient light. PrimeSense and Kinect go one step further and encode information in the near-IR light. With this tech, Kinect can distinguish objects’ depth within 1 centimeter and their height and width within 3 mm. Story continues …

Our Place - A Photographic Celebration of the Worlds Heritage Research Highlights - Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas Researchers of the Institute of Computer Science - FORTH received the First Award in software contest organized in Japan Nov 27, 2012 Researchers at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) received the First Award in the “Gesture Recognition Challenge” contest with their work titled “Giving a hand to Kinect”. The contest was organized in conjunction with the “International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2012” in Tsukuba, Japan, 10-11 November 2012 and was sponsored by Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA. The gesture recognition challenge is part of the initiative “CHALEARN - Challenges in Machine Learning” which aims at developing computational methods that enable computers to improve their problem solving capabilities as they gain more experience. The awarded work is part of the Computer Vision research that is carried out at FORTH-ICS. Contact Information: Antonis Argyros, e-mail: argyros@ics.forth.gr

Carnegie Mellon University - CMU Graphics Lab - motion capture library FaceCube: Copy Real Life with a Kinect and 3D Printer This project is a tangent off of something cool I’ve been hacking on in small pieces over the last few months. I probably would not have gone down this tangent had it not been for the recent publication of Fabricate Yourself. Nothing irks inspires me more than when someone does something cool and then releases only a description and pictures of it. The process is currently multi-step, but I hope to have it down to one button press in the future. You can then open the PLY file in MeshLab to turn it into a solid STL. You can then open the STL in OpenSCAD or Blender and scale it and modify to your heart’s (or printer’s) content. Since all of the cool kids are apparently doing it, I’ve put this stuff into a GitHub repository. Download: git clone git@github.com:nrpatel/FaceCube.gitfacecube.pymeshing.mlx Related Posts

ceriscope OSCeleton - GIThub Motion capture data BVH tools and files For everybody who is interest in using motion capture data, here is a list of services which could be useful to you. Most of them are free or are very affordable. Free Motion Capture Data Files: Over 2500 files at CG Speed: This site features a large data base of motion capture files from the Carnegie Mellon University Motion Capture Database The original site can be found here Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design: Commercial online Motion Capture Rig/Animate tool with Motion request option: Mixamo is an online system where you can either buy models or upload your own and apply pre-recorded motions. It is not free however the system runs very well and you can also request the team to record a special motion for you. Free BVH File editor and previewer: Bvhacker 1.6.1-

FaceCube: Copy Real Life with a Kinect and 3D Printer by nrp The process is currently multi-step, but I hope to have it down to one button press in the future. First, run facecube.py, which brings up a psychedelic preview image showing the closest 10 cm of stuff to the Kinect. Use the up and down arrow keys to adjust that distance threshold. Pressing spacebar toggles pausing capture, to make it easier to pick objects. You can then open the PLY file in MeshLab to turn it into a solid STL. You can then open the STL in OpenSCAD or Blender and scale it and modify to your heart’s (or printer’s) content. Since all of the cool kids are apparently doing it, I’ve put this stuff into a GitHub repository. git clone git@github.com:nrpatel/FaceCube.git

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