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Introduction
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Kinect Hacks
Glossary

Kinect

Introduction



The Kinect was originally developed by Microsoft as an attachment for the Xbox game console. Using a camera with an infrared light not visible to the human eye, it tracks the movement of people and objects in front of it in three dimensions. At $150, it is a low-cost way to capture three-dimensional and gestural information.

The Kinect is a depth camera. Instead of recording the dolor of light, it records the distance of the objects in front of it.It records the distance of the objects that are in front of it by using an IR projector and camera. Using infrared light, the Kinect captures the data of where objects are in space.

Depth images are easy for a computer to understand. Color data makes it is difficult for a programmer to pick out objects, but depth information, makes it much easier to separate an object from its background.

Infrared light has a wavelength that's longer than visible light, which is why we can't see it. The Kinect's infrared projector shines a grid of infrared dots over everything in front of it. The IR camera can capture this grid. Each Kinect is calibrated to know exactly where each of the dots from its projector appears when projected against a flat wall at a known distance. Any object that is closer than the Kinect's calibration distance will push these dots out of position in one direction and any object that's further away will push them out of position in the other direction. It uses the displacement to figure out where each object is in space.

Using Processing, you can write programs that examine the brightness of each pixel in the scene and determine the distance of every object in front of the Kinect. Processing stores pixels as 8-bit numbers between 0 and 255.



Lesson 1

Read pages 1-12 of Greg Borenstein's Making Things See. Distribute the interviews at the end of the chapter to individual or teams of students. Each individual or team has 3 weeks to prepare a 10 minute presentation on their reading. Presentations are completely open. Students may present videos, personal projects, descriptions of their artist's projects or other related inspiration.



Alternate Research Questions

Students must use at least two sources and present their findings
  1. Research the technology behind the kinect and explain how it works.
  2. Present a history of related technologies
  3. Discuss what socio-political factors influenced the technology behind the Kinect




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