AutoCAD and the Kinect for v1

This project was highlighted just a bit ago, AutoCAD and the Kinect, but at the time it was only for the SDK Beta 2. Kean wasn't going to leave it at that and has since updated it for the Kinect for Windows SDK v1.

Beyond the v1 update, he also provided the narration of his upgrade...

Updated AutoCAD + Kinect for Windows samples

While attending the recent hackathon, I spent a fair amount of time porting my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples from the Beta 2 of the Microsoft Kinect SDK (for the Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor) to the released SDK for the Kinect for Windows.

It was pretty impressive just how many of the Kinect APIs were broken between Beta 2 SDK and the final release (you can hear some additional commentary on this in this .NET Rocks episode). I understand the desire to get the API in shape prior to release – you really want to minimise any messy, legacy dependencies – but the full extent of the changes certainly took me by surprise. The good news is that there are a number of APIs that make point cloud creation simpler, for instance, so I was able to pull out some of the more icky code from the samples.

Anyway, here are the updated samples. If you’d like to diff the changes with the original version for the Beta 2 SDK, here these are, too, although be warned that I did take the opportunity to do some refactoring, particularly with respect to the speech recognition capability (I’ve now added some events to allow derived classes to add words to be recognized – previously it was all munged into base KinectJig class).

Aside from the complexity of the migration (which was thankfully minimized due to the fact I’d previously implemented a base class with much of the needed functionality), there were a few behaviors that still seem a little quirky: once started, the sensor now never seems to turn off, even after it has been stopped. You can unplug it, of course, but that doesn’t seem quite right. And having the red light stay on makes me feel like I’m being watched – it reminds me of the glowing red eyes in Terminator 2 (gulp).

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Project Information URL: http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2012/03/updated-autocad-kinect-for-windows-samples.html

Project Source URL: http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/files/KinectSamples-v1.zip

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/
• Twitter: @keanw