Kinect + Shinobi = Kinobi
Several months ago, while freelancing at EVB in San Francisco, I met an intersting young man by the name of Ben McChesney. He attended RIT, not far from my native city of Buffalo. Whilst working on this project we discussed the powers of Unity and he turned me onto how easy it is to get Kinect working in the IDE. When I went back home to NYC, I went out and bought myself a Kinect. Purely for development purposes, as I don’t own an Xbox. Within just a couple hours I was up running and tracking my avatar in Unity. I had taken my first step into a larger world.
Since then I have attended some OpenKinect events here in NYC. One hosted by M$ that made me realize they have no clue how to market this technology. Another with PrimeSense, the company who developed the underlying technology for the Kinect to begin with. At this event I was able to see first hand the capabilities demonstrated by the great Shlomo Zippel. Many of which I had seen as they are the demos included with the drivers. But he keyed me into what was being done with Unity. For months I had been visiting a gitHub only to come up with no new demos/updates. Now it seems the drivers come with full fledged examples. I was trying to hack my way around with the initial gitHub files and only got so far. Prior to this event I had an epiphany.
So this all leads to my demo. I wanted to capture a simple tossing motion like that of a frisbee for the throwing star. I assumed such a gesture would be canned into the drivers/middleware themselves, I was wrong. As has become the norm lately you need to roll your own. M$ alluded to this at their event and was something they were trying to correct with their SDK. Now prior to either of these events I had already been working on this with a simple verlet integrator. Check velocity over a few frames and if force is greater than threshold release. Problem solved…