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 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 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
Martin Krasser's Blog 6 Stop Motion Beginner Mistakes (and how to avoid them) | Stopmotion Explosion Don't be a n00b! Apply these techniques and your animated films will be better, get more likes, and amaze your audience. Animation Flicker A lot of stop motion films suffer from flicker issues. Is the camera auto-exposure turned on? (Here's a video which shows how to turn off a webcam's auto exposure with the AMCAP application). Are there lights behind you? Camera Shake When you're animating a film with toy characters, like LEGO minifigs, you want the camera to be as still as possible, or move gracefully, like a camera does in a feature film. What NEVER looks good, is a camera image that's constantly wobbling off-kilter, as the animator bumps it with their sleeve. Some animations made with larger figures, like this Paper Mario animation get away with camera shake, because the action is happening all over the room. Low Frame Rate A lot of new animators post movies they've made with still-cameras. Turn down the volume for this one ;-). Poor Camera Angles Blurry Images No Story
Open Frameworks + Kinect + Sound | Ben McChesney's Blog While attending FlITC San Francisco I saw Theo Watson talk about his work with the creative coding libraries known as open frameworks. While I didn’t have very much experience in c++ besides a couple of simple test apps to learn openGL, I thought it would be a good experience to learn a language completely different from actionscript. Below is the result that I after a very productive day of tinkering: Kinect Sound Experiment with Open Frameworks from Ben McChesney on Vimeo What is openframeworks? I think the most accurate term I’ve heard to describe it is “processing on crack”. Download + install xCode for mac Download openframeworks FAT 0061 and unzip it my work folder ( though it will work anywhere ) Compile any example project under openframeworksFolder/apps/examples/ to make things easier for yourself and to get developing quickly. Time to start playing with the Kinect. Running it looked like this : "Looking good Tex" Neat! But what’s next? But what’s next?