Free Community Edition of Intelligent Character Motion

[Dan]

As a longtime lurkers of the OpenNI message boards, those of us at
Activate3D wanted to give a little something back to the OpenNI
community. We are excited to announce a free, non-commercial version
of our Intelligent Character Motion SDK (ICM) is now available on our
website and is fully compatible with PC versions of OpenNI, NITE, and
Kinect cameras.

We think that ICM is the next step in taking advantage of Natural User
Interface. No longer are you bound by the constraints of one-to-one
character mapping or delayed gesture-based interaction. With our
technology, we can blend traditional motion-captured animation with
live Kinect data and allow you to truly embody your character in a
virtual world and leave the constraints of your living room behind.

ICM version 0.81 has the following features:
• Skeletal stabilization of OpenNI/NITE data.
• Sample virtual world activities like: rope climbing, walking, monkey
bar climbing, swimming, rock-climbing, ziplines, and trapeze.
• Samples showing off how to integrate with Ogre and OpenGL.
• Multiple strategies for hand open/closed detection at 8 feet,
including computer vision and our own custom Grasp Intention
Recognition technology.
• Examples using our API and C# layer for UI applications.
• 100’s of pages of SDK reference, user guide documentation, and
tutorials.

Words do a poor job of expressing our technology, so we’ve uploaded
several videos to our website, http://activate3d.com/ , and Youtube
channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/Activate3D .

Our press release and PR push for this will be next week, but we
wanted to let the OpenNI community get first crack at it. You can
download the free community edition at http://activate3d.com/download-icm/.

We’ve been truly inspired by what this community has done and would
love to get your feedback on our technology. This is its first
release, so there are plenty of rough edges, but we are tremendously
excited about what this innovative community can do with it. We’ve
set up a Google group to interact with our users at
http://groups.google.com/group/activate3d-icm where we will be happy
to answer questions and listen to feedback.

After you’ve installed the SDK, we recommend:
• Taking a look at the documentation found under "\SDK\Documentation
\ICM Evaluation Guide.pdf”. We especially would love feedback on the
page
titled, "So I've Got Kinect on PC..."
• After you have the Kinect camera setup for use on the PC you can run
the samples that we ship in the “Samples” folder.
• Our version of "Hello World" can be found at "\Samples\ExampleApp
\". It shows the basic setup that is required to do intention
recognition on a walking motion (just swing your arms naturally to
mimic it). There is no virtual world interaction in this sample, but
it will show you how to properly startup and shutdown our SDK.
• From there you can look at either OpenGLAnimationApp or
OgreSampleApp to see how virtual world interaction works.

We hope you find this useful and create great things,
The ICM Team

[Dan]

We've gotten some reports that the download link was broken for some
users using Internet Explorer. We think we've fixed the issue. If you
had a failed download, you may want to try again. If you continue to
have problems, please contact us at sup...@activate3d.com to resolve
the problem.

Thanks,
The ICM Team

> download the free community edition athttp://activate3d.com/download-icm/.

>
> We’ve been truly inspired by what this community has done and would
> love to get your feedback on our technology. This is its first
> release, so there are plenty of rough edges, but we are tremendously
> excited about what this innovative community can do with it.  We’ve

> set up a Google group to interact with our users athttp://groups.google.com/group/activate3d-icmwhere we will be happy