Friday, January 21, 2011

Senior Project Kickoff Post

This blog will be detailing the progress of my senior design capstone project. I will be completing the project over the course of the spring 2011 semester.

My project is the creation of virtual building block experience utilzing the Microsoft Kinect hardware system; here is the abstract: 
I plan to simulate a building block experience using the Microsoft Kinect hardware system. I will use the Kinect to track the player’s hands and head in order to present them with objects that appear to project out of their screens that they can pick up and move around as if they were real. The objects will be given real world physical properties to create a realistic building block experience, where unstable structures crumble, and improperly placed pieces can bring the entire structure crashing down. The objects will also be given interesting shapes to encourage user creativity and experimentation. The project will use the Libfreenect open source library to extract information from and send orders to the Kinect device and graphics output will be handled by the Microsoft DirectX libraries.

My anticipated work for next week:
  1. Complete background research
    1. Research face/head recognition algorithms
    2. Research hand recognition algorithms
    3. Determine whether to use existing physics system or roll my own 
  2. Begin framework setup integrating DirectX at least
  3. Figure out how I'm going to obtain a Kinect :)
 

3 comments:

  1. Oof, no Kinect :(
    Does Microsoft provide any sort of simulator or input device for developers, to use in place of the actual hardware?

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  2. Just curious why you are using DirectX instead of OpenGL? We are pretty OpenGL heavy at Penn, so I am all for students experimenting with different APIs. Though, I would not recommend using anything below D3D 10 unless you need to run on pre-Shader Model 4 hardware.

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  3. That is a nice catch Pat, I missed that.
    Damon, do answer his question, he makes a good point.

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