Hacking the Kinect

Posted by ramsey on May 6, 2011 in Tech | 0 comments

When it comes to tech, there are two things I certainly love: Flash, and Kinect. Some clever folks are combining the two with tricky hacks, and the results are nice.

Blitz Agency, a leading marketing/interactive agency here in LA, has a nice post compiling a lot of different hacks used to let Flash work with the motion capture capabilities of the Kinect platform. It’s all certainly far from production-ready, but if you’re a geek who loves experimenting, or if your company needs a new system for a demo or interactive presentation, you should really consider giving this a try.

Flash Kinect Demo from BLITZ on Vimeo.

Blitz details their approach to the problem with this little tech tidbit:

Their interest was piqued after Hector Martin and PrimeSense™ released their open-source drivers, resulting in an online demo showing Kinect’s uses through a PC. Having worked with multiple UI technologies over the years, Gedrich and Flomin realized that if they could get Kinect to publish information that any UI platform could support, a slew of developers could use this same code to create breakthrough motion-based experiences using familiar markup languages.

The trick? A simple socket server. Using a C++ application to send all the skeleton data to a socket server, they were able to connect other technology to the socket, enabling use of the data.

Ah, socket servers. The old standby for hacking Flash on devices

If you want to get into the code, hit up Blitz’s blog post on Flash + Kinect