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OpenNI & CLNUI Working Together

victormartins — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 01:54:27 +0000

Since the release of OpenNI, I wanted to find a way to be able to keep Skeleton Tracking features while having access to things such as Motor control, LED options, etc. OpenNI as an API for PrimeSensor, makes sense that it doesn’t include any of this features, afterall it’s not their problem (speculation). Well, recently i found a thread at the OpenNI Groups from a guy named Michael Kuzmin that made me feel stupid as to how simple it is to have both things working together. Only for Windows OS.

And I quote:
“Simply install OpenNI and after that CL NUI. Then all three components (audio, motor, camera) should be managed by CL NUI.
Now just go to your hardware configuration and delete the driver for the NUI Camera. When you have done that, the OpenNI driver should be found by your OS.
If your OS installs the NUI driver again, just go to your CL NUI installation dir and rename the “driver” folder, so it can’t find it again.”

Kinect Disintegrates

victormartins — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:01:23 +0000

Another of my recent experiments with the kinect. As i keep wanting to play with particles running on the GPU i thought i would make it much more fun to play with and connect it with the Kinect. I came up with this. A million particles makes the user and disintegrates as time goes by. Actually, it looks like a man made of sand. Have a look:

This is how it all started:

Kinect Cloth Simulation

victormartins — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:50:16 +0000

During my christmas holidays i had time to spare and some ideas to develop, so with all the party-feeling and booze i started working on the one i wanted the most. This is a cloth simulation running on the CPU which you can interact with using the kinect. With the 3d information from the kinect i’m able to change the cloth in some cool ways. The most interesting is plain and simple, offset each connection point by the depth at that point. With that done i had to go with the visual side (fun fun!), so i started playing with per-pixel lighting and some cool patterns.

Then added self-shadowing to the mixture and some color control just for the fun and looks of it.

In the end i thought it would be nice to take my carpet out to clean. Happy holidays!

OpenNI Block of Code

victormartins — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:41:17 +0000

OpenNI, a library created by PrimeSense. It’s quite famous for its ability to use the Kinect to track users and feed us with a usable skeleton per user. Since i wanted to give this a try and play around with the skeleton tracking i had to have this. So i did. In the end i ended up with a wrapper around this API. It’s open-source and available to everyone. Its not perfect and needs work and more features, but it’s just a start. Use it at your own risk and with your favourite creative framework. It’s possible.

You can find it at github.

Grazing Jellies

victormartins — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:36:41 +0000

Grazing Jellies is an augmented reality project i had the pleasure to work in. I made team with Neil Mendonza and Hudson-Powell, commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices festival. Grazing Jellies takes place in a forest, a realtime portal into a colorful dream-like world of jelly creatures. The creatures were created to react to movement of the ambient/people and can also be called by making noise, When nothing is going on they wander around the world and hunt for food. My work on this project was mostly about the jellies generation/animation/rendering.

At first, there was the idea to use metaballs for the creatures, we wanted to give this jelly surfaces some wobbling/round forms. After some testing we decided not to, as i did not see any advantage specially in performace, so we went with a more “traditional” method. The creatures were generated from 2 steps. The body and the head.

The body: Create a skeleton line and generate a deforming cylindrical body from the line. After some time and tweaking the body right. After just had to start playing with values to get the animation going. Some trig + using creature’s motion parameters worked just fine, we got it right, but, there was still a problem, the creature’s heads. The head: Well i tried different methods, interpolating the body’s end with some spherical shape wish ease on, but it did not work out. The head textures just didn’t look good, “pinched” as Jody said several times. We ended up creating the head as a second step, building an hemisphere and then “attaching” it to the body’s end. Good news is later on, it came handy, as it made things alot easier to map the head’s texture. Some things just come handy sometimes. I had to tweak a bit to get the head and body animation get along, but in the end it turned out to look pretty good.

As for the lighting side, a kind of “ambient light” + phong lighting + cubemap reflections made it to the final version.

This is an awesome project and i really enjoyed working with the team. As said before this should not be a closed project, it was projected to live and change so it can fit other ambients, so expect to see more from the *mighty* Grazing Jellies.

Some videos on the development blog.

Full article on the festival @ Wired.

xDA media lab, first project: GroundSpines Graffiti

victormartins — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:51:21 +0000

xDA is a new medialab located in Coimbra/Portugal. Here’s its first project using a customized version of (hmm 3.x) aka GroundSpines. enjoy the show and if you by any chance visit Coimbra, get in touch.. We’ll have a beer and talk crazy!