kinect hacking

[Georgia Guthrie]

Just wanted to get the ball rolling. So the other night at our kinect
hacking session we had to spend a lot of time finding open source
software for the kinect. Microsoft's SDK doesn't run on macs and it
has some sticky language in the license about non-commercial use.
(read more about that here:http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/
microsoft-kinect-hackers/)

So far we found Openni, which seems like it will work:
http://code.google.com/p/simple-openni/

Of course the OpenKinect wiki has been really helpful:
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page

If anyone has suggestions or wants to check out those links and
comment please do!

[Georgia Guthrie]

Just wanted to add that we found another program for the kinect and it
is really, really simple. It's called Greenfoot and is similar to
Scratch in that it offers bits of code in blocks that you can move
around - a very graphic and tactile way to program.
Here's the site:
http://www.greenfoot.org/doc/kinect/

So you still need OpenNI to work with the Kinect but the tutorials and
interface to program stuff in Greenfoot looks really simple so it will
be beginner-friendly.

We weren't able to hook up the kinect this week because the power
cable never made it to the Hacktory space, it might be in a pile of
Stan's mail somewhere.