Kinect tracking

UPDATE: The’re newer versions and posts about this software – if you want to test it please have a look at: http://blog.mosthege.net/tag/kindriver/

It’s been only 5 days since MS launched the Kinect for Windows SDK and in three of these days I coded KinDriver (and another small tool I’ll write about too).

KinDriver is a dynamic Kinect tracker designed to be used with racing/driving games. We’ve seen Kinect trackers designed for the use w/ games already (talking of FAAST at this point), which may work nicely with ego-shooters or adventure games, but have a huge disadvantage when it comes to driving: They only know 1 or 0, just like the real keyboard. But while you can (an do) tip keys many times in a short period of time on your keyboard, doing so with you whole body is even more exhausting than you think!

So I made a tracker that essentially uses the incline between your hands and their distance to the rest of your body to repeatedly hit the right key for various durations:

You can define keys for acceleration/aecelleration, left/right, handbrake an a special action (which is to press a key and then enable/disable tracking after 4 seconds –> hijacking in GTA..).

KinDriver has a Speech-Recognition feature too, so you can enable/disable tracking or execute the special-command. For the moment I will release the current KinDriver version which is designed for use with GTA (San Andreas). I will add extended SR features (meaning you can edit the commands), but I won’t promise any dates at this point.

NOTE: commands are: start, stop, deactivate, handbrake, enter, leave, getout

We’ve recently seen a GTA IV Kinect Fake and I would have done the following videos w/ GTA IV as well, but I have some trouble getting the keystroke-events ingame (if you have a solution let me know ), so here are two videos I made using KinDriver to drive in GTA:SA. (I’m only showing the good parts – especially SR is not working very well atm.)

Before I give you the download links lets talk about the prerequisites:

For both:

*.NET Framework 4

And for KinDriver:

*a Kinect, of course

*the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta

*the Microsoft Speech Platform – Software Development Kit

*the Microsoft Speech Platform – Server Runtime

*the Kinect for Windows Runtime Language Pack

IMPORTANT: You need the x86 versions of both, MSP. SDK and MSP. Server Runtime !!!!

I may have forgotten something

If you run KinDriver there are a couple of reasons why it may crash:

1. I have implemented error handling in no way (yeah, I’m a bad boy ;P)
2. Your Kinect is either not connected or has no power (crash on start)
3. You have not installed all needed components for SR (crashes when you want to enable audio commands)
4. Microsoft.Speech.dll is not in the same directory as KinDriver.exe (crashes when you want to enable audio commands)

There may be more issues. If you find another one please contact me (thecakedev@hotmail.com)

NOTE: I haven’t tried (b/c I have none), but playing in combination with Wiimote/Nunchuk is even more fun!!

Happy driving!

KeystrokeVisualizer: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7813771/Blog/KeystrokeVizualizer.zip

KinDriver: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7813771/Blog/KinDriver.zip