Late Post 2: Getting Kinect to work on PC

Sat 4/16/11

Setting up Kinect on Linux desktop was fairly straightforward. The platform that we used was Fedora 14. We followed the openkinect guide using libfreenect library that can be found here under the section for Linux.

After we fired up the glview test demo, we can see two video frames (depth and regular video).

Following that, we modified the glview.c to implement the functionality that we desired, detecting the four corners and middle of the dance pad. First, we removed the regular video output as it would take extra resources. Comparison file between original and modified can be downloaded here: glview-depth-only.diff

To better distinguish the sections of detection, we made changes to the code further more and averaged out the depth information in blocks.The result was a pixelated figure whose pixels were easily countable. The depth information is summed each detection zone. When a summed depth is above the set threshold, the program outputs the corresponding zone in the Terminal.

Comparison File: glview-demo-day.diff

Finally, we removed all graphical output leaving only text output indicating which pads are detected. The text outputs are top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right, and middle ("TL", "TR", "BL", "BR", "MM").

Comparison File: glview-text-only.diff