burning hill games

Finally got two hands working, turned out to be relatively easy once we stopped semi-randomly trying stuff and took a moment to study the openNI and NITE documentation. So our first project with this technology is now back on track. We are now looking at implementing gestures, but to be honest with only 4 weeks left till the deadline it is getting to the stage where we have to decide what level of Kinect functionality is actually required. At the moment we have two fully controlled pointers on the screen, one mapped to each hand, and we have designed the UI so that there are a couple of different selection methods. One activating the moment a had point touches it for instant selection, and another with a delay so the user is required to hover the pointer over the selection for a couple of seconds before it registers. For the purposes of this project that is probably more than sufficient, however I do feel that it is important to properly investigate the alternatives.  The main thing that has been drummed home to me while adding multiple hand tracking to this project is that you should READ THE DOCUMENTATION.  Especially with new hardware/software, study the API’s, go to the creators website, search the internet for what other people are doing(this also is extremely handy as other people will probably have stumbled into the same problems that you are having), but most importantly READ THE DOCUMENTATION.  Don’t just glance through it, study it in detail before you even think about writing a line of code, at least that way you have less chance of wasting days going in the wrong direction.

Currently I’m working on a simple rhythm game using the Kinect sensor on a PC,  I don’t actually own a Kinect yet but luckily one of my team does.  We decided on using the OpenNI drivers rather than openKinect as it was the simplest to install, had good documentation and was released by the hardware manufacturers.  So far we have been working on it for about 5 weeks, at about 3 hours a week, so the fact that we have a functioning interface that tracks a single hand and allows it to register an interaction with on-screen buttons is quite rewarding.  Now all we have to do is come up with some actions to assign to the buttons  so that we can actually get a bit of game-play.