How to use Kinect Interface?

After initial calibration, Kinect is able to track human movement in the form of match-stick skeletons.

The OpenNI Inteface will produce the position of each body part of interest (head, hand, elbow, etc.) in the form of its coordinates (x,y,z). In what follows, updateBodyInfo() pushes the device to grab next frame from camera and update BodyInfo in kinect object, and getBodyInfo() retrieves the BodyInfo from kinect object.

A typical main program may look like the following:

    int id = 0x01;
        Kinect *kinect = new Kinect(id);	//create kinect object
        BodyInfo body;	//declare BodyInfo object
        kinect->initKinect();        //init kinect object and start the
device
        while(1) {
                kinect->updateBodyInfo();         /*request the device to
get a new frame from camera and update BodyInfo*/
                body = kinect->getBodyInfo();        /*retrieve BodyInfo
from kinect object*/
                if(body.bTracking)	/*bTrack indicate whether the device
has confidence about what it is tracking*/
                        printf("%.0f, %.0f,
%.0f\n",body.pRHand.X,body.pRHand.Y,body.pRHand.Z);
/*pRHand.X is X coordinate of right hand*/
                //else
                        //printf("No Body Info Updated\n");
        }
        delete kinect;	//clean up

The above program produces the following output (the coordinates of successive right hand positions):

• All source code are saved on google code webpage (See next section for download instruction)

  To develop components based upon the Kinect interface, you need to include BodyInfo.h/cpp, Kinect.h/.cpp, KinectFunction.h and Setup_XML.xml.

  Also, make sure your program link to libraries under "lib" folder and add "include" as additional include folder.

• Java Wrapper is also available on "Kinect Java Wrapper". The whole package is an Eclipse sample project.

Where to download the source code?

How to provide an add-on Kinect Interface?

For the following example, the source code is available on google code: "http://code.google.com/p/cs1530-kinect/downloads/list" A video demo can be found on YouTube: "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFo8dTNghw"

In the demo, after the Kinect calibration phase a 'start' gesture (a wave of the right hand) will start the application. A 'stop' gesture (a horizontal left hand pointing at a vertical right hand) will stop the application.

When the GestureDetector in the main program HHAMain.cpp detects a gesture such as the 'start' hand gesture, the sendCommand(ICMD_START) outputs "HOME HEALTH APPLICATION START" and starts the application. When the 'stop' gesture is detected the sendCommand(ICMD_STOP) stops the application and outputs "HOME HEALTH APPLICATION STOP".

The user can also use the web interface to do the same. When the user clicks on the "Start Application" button on the web page test1.html, the associated JavaScript function runCmd('start') (see the source for test1.html) sends a 'start' message to c:\\Program Files\\HomeHealthApp\\HHARemoteClient.exe. The HHARemoteClient sends ICMD_START through a socket to the main program. The main program HHAMain maintains three threads to interact with Kinect device, display device and HHARemoteClient. Upon reception of ICMD_START, sendCommand(ICMD_START) in the main program outputs "HOME HEALTH APPLICATION START" and starts the application. It is the same for the 'stop' command. Please note the web page for this example only works properly on IE brower.

The application developer can add more buttons to the web page test1.html, more commands to HHARemoteClient.cpp, and more processing functions to sendCommand() for a realistic application. GestureDetector() must also be expanded to detect additional hand gestures and body gestures. For this purpose a structure called BodyInfo containing the 3D-coordinates of all body parts that can be tracked by Kinect is provided. The program is BodyInfo.cpp, and the corresponding structure is BodyInfo.h. More information can be found in the following Readme.txt.