I love you, Kinect.

Very cool. I hope to be getting a Kinect (and Xbox) soon.

That works quite well except the framerate drops considerably when lots of rippling is happening but considering it's just a test I think it's quite good.

By the way. If I install VS2010 Express will it mess with the Windows Phone 7 tools I already have installed. Any stories of incompatibilities?

I'm guessing it's VS2010Express1.iso that you install?

@Bass: Thanks.

@dentaku: Performance kind of depends on where you run it, I suppose. The pixel shaders run on the GPU so it kind of depends on what kind of graphics card you have. It doesn't slow down noticably on my desktop, but I kind of see a drop on my laptop. You can mess with the maxRipples constant in MainWindow to decrease the number of ripples (and thus the number of nested Border elements, which I think are the main culprit) on the screen at one time and see if that helps. You can also increase minRippleDistance but I feel that it gets kind of noticable if you force them to be more than five pixels apart from each other.

Installing VC# Express shouldn't mess with the Windows phone tools, I have both running on my laptop. No idea which iso though, I always just download it from http://www.microsoft.com/express.

Installing VC# Express shouldn't mess with the Windows phone tools, I have both running on my laptop. No idea which iso though, I always just download it from http://www.microsoft.com/express.

OK, it's just that the webpage has a bunch of downloads listed on it. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express
The bottom link is an .ISO with everything included in it.

I have a Geforce 8800 GTS and a Core 2 Duo 6800 so I'm not running it on ancient hardware
It plays Portal 2 with 8x anti-aliasing at 1680X1050 just fine for example.
Once I have VS Express installed I'll mess with it a bit and see what effect lowering the ripples has.

@Bas:Ok, I mounted the ISO and installed Visual C# Express then modified the ripple settings and it made no difference to the performance. What I DID notice is that every time any rippling happens my harddrive goes crazy (I have 3 so I'm not sure if it's C:\ but I'm assuming it is). There's constant drive activity. The second I move back and the rippling stops the drive/drives settle down.

I doubt I'm running out of ram (I've got 4GB) but yes, it sounds like when software uses the HD for "swap space".

I haven't updated my nvidia drivers in forever. Maybe I'll try that.

1 hour ago,CKurt wrote

@dentaku:Looks like you do not have enough RAM and the Hard Drive is used to extend it? Or you have a bad video driver.

@CKurt:Just updated my nvidia drivers for the first time since Win7 came out and it mode no difference. It's weird but at least the demo still works.

thanks for the code bas, cool stuff

It only happens when the rippling is happening. It stops instantly when he rippling stops. No other demos have caused this to happen.

I wonder if it's my C,F,G or H drive that's doing it?

20 hours ago,CKurt wrote

@dentaku: I'm wondering why there might be so much hard disk activity. The activity is only when the effect needs to be applied, not when the app is running normally?

 

@dentaku: You could use the Disk tab on the Resource Monitor to see which process is accessing which files when it happens. If it is swapping you should see lots of activity on pagefile.sys

@Sven Groot:Hmmm. I'm not sure how to interpret the data from Resource Monitor but the pagefile doesn't seem to be accessed much at all (sometimes never). I have noticed the the Readyboost cache on I:\ was getting written to allot but removing that drive didn't change anything.

C:\$LogFile (NTFS Volume Log) gets written to allot while the drives are going. That's the only consistent thing.

Great! Love it. I did a similar demo a few months ago using NITE. Not nearly as nice as this though. Checking out the code now...

Looks like my own Kinect project made it onto Engadget.  Unfortunately they took the video I made for Chris Pirillo and not one of my own... but oh well.

@SlackmasterK: Congrats on the exposure.  I saw Kinnect NUI on Codeplex but haven't given it a whirl yet. Can you get a version that works when the user is sitting at the desktop? I want to use by PC as normal, but having the Kinect as an augmentation to keyboard and mouse while I'm sitting there (e.g. wave away a notification).

Herbie

13 minutes ago,Dr Herbie wrote

@SlackmasterK: Congrats on the exposure.  I saw Kinnect NUI on Codeplex but haven't given it a whirl yet. Can you get a version that works when the user is sitting at the desktop? I want to use by PC as normal, but having the Kinect as an augmentation to keyboard and mouse while I'm sitting there (e.g. wave away a notification).

Herbie

uhh, maybe?  The project relies on the SDK and Kinect to provide skeletal information, and it tends to go all wonky when you sit down. Especially with a desk blocking you.  Haven't tried it without a desk in the way.

I've found that it works reasonably well if you sit down, but only when it has seen you stand before.