Windows Driver/SDK Now Available: http://nuigc.com/clkinect

Johnny 5 is alive!!!
johny5 Johnny5
~~~~~~ Nov 7 ~~~~~~

If you remember my PS3 Eye on Windows post then you’ll really like this one:

Under the hood, the Kinect device hosts some pretty amazing hardware. For starters, the Kinect’s depth sensor is stunning. A quality depth sensing camera like this would ordinarily cost a couple orders of magnitude more than the Kinect device itself. For only ~$150, Kinect makes RGB-D type of sensing accessible to anyone. The potential uses are numerous including HCI, robotics, educational use, surveillance, motion capture, people/object tracking, 3D scanning, etc.

Having all this in mind, as a research project, I took a weekend challenge of getting this awesome new Xbox device to work on Windows 7.
Here are the first tests of controlling the Kinect NUI Motor and reading the built in real-time accelerometer data on a PC.
The outlook looks good for other sensors on the device (i.e. cameras and microphones).

~~~~~~ Nov 8 ~~~~~~

As promised here are some more tests that reveal the Kinect NUI Camera action (Color & Depth Sensors).
Both Color and Depth cameras running @ 640x480. As you can see Kinect runs quite good on Window 7.

Hopefully, soon we’ll have multiple Kinect devices going like: http://nuigc.com/clmulticam

~~~~~~ Nov 9 ~~~~~~

Color and 3D Depth Sensing with Kinect

After a great response from the community we have started a project to help open source our research related to the Microsoft’s new Xbox Kinect device. We started a 10k donation fund to complete driver specifications and software for the Xbox Kinect Audio, Color/Depth Cameras and Motor/Accelerometer.

We want to help the community and accelerate Kinect support on Linux/Mac/Windows as well as provide clear documentation. We see huge potential of the Kinect’s influence on robotics and computer vision and upon the completion of the fund we will release a full project under an open source license. We hope the fund completes quickly and if not we still have plans on releasing a Free Windows Driver and SDK just like we have done in the past with the PS3 Eye devices.

Thanks to Adafruit for there is already $3000 available and we will try and work with them to see if we can make something happen. We are not looking to make money but believe a properly funded project will bring us great results and help us all faster access the full capabilities of the sensors as well as foster future developments such as 3D mapping/tracking.

~~~~~~ Nov 10 ~~~~~~

We have decided to close the fund, We have learned that ChipIn is not a good solution for such efforts and saw progress by other contenders. We have have raised a total of $457, which we will now be donating all of it to Hector/his projects for his success. Overall this was a huge success and the NUI Group alone got nearly 50,000 visitors in past 3 days… so congratulations to everyone involved in brining attention to such topics.

Thanks and stay tuned for more video updates as well as downloads for the Driver and Test Applications for using your Kinect in Windows

AlexP

That was quick !!!

very quick haha. awesome job alexp… this device has a lot of potential!

Haven’t been here in a while, but when I saw NUI Group on engadget, I wanted to give props to who I now know is Alex for excellent work

Very cool AlexP, nice to see that you are on top of this great little controllerunit! Looking forward to see what you can do!
2 days until launch in sweden!

Congrats Alex! Added a First Week Results Videos Thread: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/11164/

Also for reference I have added Microsoft’s response:

“Kinect for Xbox 360 has not been hacked--in any way--as the software and hardware that are part of Kinect for Xbox 360 have not been modified. What has happened is someone has created drivers that allow other devices to interface with the Kinect for Xbox 360. The creation of these drivers, and the use of Kinect for Xbox 360 with other devices, is unsupported. We strongly encourage customers to use Kinect for Xbox 360 with their Xbox 360 to get the best experience possible.”

From Gamespot

Great work Alex !!! ^:)^

Figured someone here would be the first to do it :D Not out in the UK yet so I didn’t even get a chance to crack it first :(
Congrats anyway, great achievement, this will be great for robotics applications.

Whuhu! Loooking good! Thanks for the videothread Christian!

Amazing work Alex like always !!!!!!!!!!

Nice work.  Will be interesting to see where this goes.

Awesome.  Looking forward to this.

Great work I threw $100 in the Kitty. Would love to see you opensource this quickly so others can help develop it.  If you collect the bounty today while it is still available (cause it will go quick) I am pretty sure the community will keep donating (bird in the hand). I will blast this out on twitter etc

As per my other post modified BSD or similar License please

-edit-
i have the domains openkinect.com .net .org i will donate to an opensource initiative when code is released as well.

awesome, can’t wait to try kinect with the software i wrote for the camcube. Although it seems preety useless now, as soon as the body data is hacked aswell.

@Koabi Well the good thing is if the project can get some support we can consider the challenges we face in future like gesture/skeleton tracking.

Updated (Removed Email Headers)

We received an email from Christian - below is the email, thanks for the interest - we appreciate it, we don’t think $10k upfront is in the spirit of what we’re trying to do, but we are very thrilled to see another bounty!

thanks for the note.

the bounty is currently up to $3k and may increase more, it really
depends on how often microsoft says silly things. so far they’ve moved
it from $1k to $3k in one week. very impressive.

we’re really not worried about open source drivers coming out - it’s
not if, just when, we have a usb scope on the way and we’ll likely
reproduce what alexp did to help folks along. you’ll see a data dump
on our github shortly, we needed to buy a beagle 480. we also work
with the last person who “hacked” the xbox, bunnie - so we’re pretty
sure it’s all going to work out great for open source folks.

if someone want to release open source drivers we think it should be
because they believe in that type of sharing, the bounty is just a
gesture and we’re not going to attempt to hold anyone’s money besides
our own for this, that’s not something we want to do - it can quickly
get complicated and we’d rather spend time on helping folks release
the drivers than consulting with lawyers about international fund
collection - there are also fees with any method, we’d rather see how
this goes for another week or so before we consider other options.

you’re welcome to start another bounty with “real funding” - perhaps
that might be a better way to get the drivers - we’d love to see
competing bounties!

thanks for the note, we really appreciate it.

cheers,
adafruit

Hey guys/gals,

I’m a member of NUI Group and have been working with AlexP on trying
to help him to open source his research. We noticed your project and
wish to team up and get this thing started the best way we can, I
personally would love to just release however Alex has much different
experience and we both really believe if we can get some real funding
behind this that we could really get more people excited and quickly get to the harder tasks ahead.

A big thanks/congrats goes out for the Adafruit Community and
hopefully we can work together on future projects as well.

I do not mean to step on any toes (projects) at believe we want the
same thing… and as you can see if anyone can get this done fast its
Alex.

Cheers, Chris