What I have been doing this week_ Kinecting

I couldn't wait to test the Kinect! To my surprise, Microsoft had developed an official Kinect Developer's kit which I got my hands on. And after having the tricky task of sorting out the drivers, add ons etc, I managed run some tests.

Below are a few screenshots of the tests:

Depth Basics  

This function analyses the depth of the environment the user is.

 Kinect Explorer

It gives you an overview of the abilities of the Kinect and lets you test it. 

  Skeletal Viewer

This one shows the movement joints which form a skeleton, which if can recorded can lead to motion capture.

I was looking for an environment 3D scanner and came across two:
Reconstructme and
Skanect

Reconstructme seems to work but kept losing the tracker. This might be due to the dim lights in my room. Skanect refused to work. Will be giving it another go tomorrow. But seems to produce nice effects from people who managed to get it to work.

Skanect workspace

Source

Whilst researching for the possibility for motion capture, I can across an application called Bloop which works with Blender [ideal!]. I didn't manage to get it to work with the few attempts I had though. I will have to test KSimmulator 's attempt.

Bloop being tested

Source