Getting the most of the Kinect SDK

Hard to get more "getting started" than an article on initialization of the Kinect...

Getting most of Kinect SDK in C# - part 1 of ?: Initialization

Introduction

This is part one of series documenting my experiments with Kinect for Windows SDK.
After first two or three articles this series should make quite good walkthrough for beginners and nice reference for more advanced developers.

Background

Kinect is a sensor originally developed for Microsoft's XBOX 360 console. It has regular video camera, IR camera for depth detection and array of microphones.

Here you can find all information about Kinect and its SDK for Windows.

SDK basics

To use SDK in your application you need to reference Microsoft.Research.Kinect assembly. It contains two namespaces:

• Microsoft.Research.Kinect.Nui - Used for visual features
• Microsoft.Research.Kinect.Audio - Used for audio features

At this point I will focus on NUI part of SDK and its features:

• DepthStream - Interface to depth sensor
• VideoStream - Interface to video camera
• SkeletonEngine - Engine for tracing up to two human bodies
• NuiCamera - Device info and control (mainly for getting/setting elevation angle)

To start coding you need to use the Runtime class from SDK. This class provides an entry point for device enumeration and initialization. In most of cases all you need is to get instance of Runtime class:

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Project Information URL: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MostOfKinectSDK1.aspx

Project Download URL: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MostOfKinectSDK1/JK.KinectExperiments.zip

Project Source URL: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MostOfKinectSDK1/JK.KinectExperiments.zip

Runs with Beta2? Yes