Kinect is a new product from Microsoft for XBox360. With an RGB camera, a 3D depth sensor (structured IR light) and a multi-array microphone , it is able to compute a depth map, something very interesting for the interactive world of creativity and gaming. Nothing new as technology, but still, interesting and cheap. Since its release people have been trying to work in order to hack it and get it to work with windows and mac OS. Quite a few people have been working on drivers and a way to hack the gadget to get access to the color/depth data. One of these people is called Alex from Code Laboratories, the man behind the PS3eye camera drivers for PC’s. Recently, he released a new package (C and C#) that includes drivers and SDK for Kinect. I took the SDK and with JNA i wrote a library for java that wraps the original one and also tries to make its use easy for starters.
A very early release is available http://victamin.googlecode.com/files/CLNUI4J_01.zip. This might or might not work out-of-the-box and it sure needs improvement and more work, but as they say, release early, release often. This package includes the library and basic examples running on Eclipse IDE and processing IDE (untested). It is known that this library does not work directly with Processing.
EDIT! Version 0.2 is now available at: http://victamin.googlecode.com/files/CLNUI4J_02.zip.
You can now find a friendly wrapper and a couple of examples to get you started.
I would love to get some feedback, so if you’re a Kinect owner and you’re into java/processing, give it a spin and let me know how it works out for you.
Have fun.