For last month’s Onn/Of festival Dumb Eyes produced an interactive video installation that I did all of the software for. It was our most ambitious experiment with the XBox Kinect to date. While our previous experiments used the depth buffer this one used the skeletal tracking abilities of the Kinect to follow the viewers’ hands and allow the guests to manipulate and control the colorful, glowing cube that we placed before them on screen.
The projected portion of the installation consisted of a cube and two videos, one that was played in the background and another that was played on each face of the cube. Both videos were produced by Christian Petersen, the model for the cube was produced by Nick Bartoletti and I engineered the program that placed the cube, the videos and the gave the attendees control over the whole thing. The program was written in C# using Microsoft’s XNA framework and their Kinect toolkit.
Rotational math is something you deal with on a day-to-day basis in graphics programming but three dimensional rotation is a little less familiar to me, so to help get an idea of how the controls should work I wrote a quick sketch in Processing and hashed out some ideas which you may try out below if you have a Java enabled browser. If you have any trouble try downloading Java for your browser via this link: http://www.java.com/en/.
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