Using the Kinect to create an interactive portfolio

Today's project is one that is one that is inspirational in a couple of ways. One is that it shows a great idea of thinking outside the box when displaying your skills and experience. The other is that the just released tutorial can help you create a portfolio of your own...

Interactive portfolio using Kinect

I like to explore different technologies that relate with computers and that’s why I own a Lego Mindstorms NXT . More recently I bought a Kinect to transform some ideas into real applications.

I’m currently looking for job in software development in the Toronto (Canada) area and it occurred to me that I could present my portfolio in a fun and entertaining way. So I decided to create my first Kinect application to be this interactive portfolio. Although I have some years of experience in business applications, portals, intranets, etc., I decided to compile only my experience in game development and interactive 3d projects.

If you don’t own a Kinect you can watch the video below to see how it works. I encourage you to skip the video in case you want to try the application or you’ll ruin the experience.

Project Information URL: http://n0n4m3.codingcorner.net/?p=557

Project Download URL: http://n0n4m3.codingcorner.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/SabinoResume.zip

Kinect Slide Tutorial

Part of my Kinect Portfolio presentation had slides controlled by gestures. This short tutorial explains how I made it work. As I said in the other post, I used a Gesture Library to help with the gesture recognition, Kinect SDK Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Gesture Recognition. This is a great project that is available on CodePlex and uses a cool algorithm called Dynamic Time Warping which is pretty cool for pattern recognition such as gestures or voice, among others. If you’re curious like me and want to know how this algorithm works, take a look at this link.

But onto the slide tutorial. I started by taking the core files to handle the gesture recognition and plug it in with my project. After a couple of little changes mostly to call an event handler when a gesture is recognized and to work with the final Kinect SDK 1.0., I used the original program to generate the gestures file which contains the information needed to detect gestures. I actually recorded two different gestures for each “SlideLeft” and “SlideRight” gesture just to make sure that different gestures done by different people would be caught by the algorithm.

The next step was to figure out how to animate the slides. I didn’t have experience with WPF animations but I arrived at this solution which works but might not be the best.

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Project Information URL: http://n0n4m3.codingcorner.net/?p=614

Project Source URL: http://n0n4m3.codingcorner.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/SlideTutorial.zip

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://www.ricardosabino.com
• Twitter: @l0kus