Natural Interaction Programming with Microsoft Kinect

Abstract: This report has the purpose of exploring the area of developing a natural interaction game using Microsoft Kinect. The launch of Kinect for Microsoft Xbox 360 has given us hardware for tracking humans, face recognition, speech recognition and 3D reconstruction for a relatively cheap price. This has created other areas of usage for Kinect than just in the area of games for Xbox. In this report I find out which development tools that are available today for developing applications for the PC platform and what they offer. I also choose one of them and develop a game with it with the purpose of evaluating the tool and also for getting the experience of creating an application with a natural user interface. The report is also part of a pre-study to introduce natural user interface applications into a game course at the university. This raises some requirements on the tools and therefore many of the discussions and results are with those requirements in mind. Those requirements being mainly that the tools should be available on the Windows platform and that they should be easy to use. The results shows that the area of developing natural interaction applications is new and therefore the tools available today are not totally mature yet. There are free tools from open source communities and tools from companies that you have to purchase to use. Both of them are trying to find their own way when it comes to the features and distribution of the tools and therefore which way to take is not obvious. Also developing a natural user interface is not always that straight forward. When there are no buttons available at all, it changes what you can do and how you do things. I will share my experiences and thoughts of both the development tools and the game I created throughout the report.