Week 5 maybe? I dunno, Project 2 start!

So we get to use XNA for this next project, yay!  MOAI can go to hell and not come back until it's properly documented.  Anywho, we got to pick from several potential projects ranging from engineering edutainment to physical therapy with Kinect games.  Since edutainment games generally suck and since thermodynamics is probably the most boring of all the dynamics, we decided to go with the physical therapy game.  That and I really wanted to use my Kinect for something, its just been sitting on my tv not even plugged in for well over a year now.  Just watching me, wanting to be loved.

So early in the week I found some Kinect XNA tutorial blog and successfully got my Kinect to move around and display an image.  It was pretty exciting, you should have been there.  Yesterday though, I figured out how to display the depth stream and the skeletal tracking streams which are way cooler.  Turns out the way Kinect tracks skeletal movement is really simple to use.  Whatever it is doing is probably super complicated, but it just returns a collection of 20 joints to you.  Using the tutorial I was able to map a red circle to each joint and make a sort of marionette puppet that tracks a persons movement.  It ended up being substantially more entertaining than any game I've played on Kinect so far, so that's good.  After that I had pretty much exhausted all the tutorials on the blog I found, it started off so strong, but like most things on the internet, it was only maintained for a month before the author lost interest or whatever.

That's when I started reading the Kinect API and finding all sorts of fun things.  Most importantly which joint was mapped to the right hand... turns out it's called HandRight, solid variable naming on Microsoft's part if I do say so myself.  Once figuring that out and how to use it I was able to limit the red circles that were being drawn to only the one mapped to my right hand.  And thus the prototypes primary form of input was born!

Pretty much everything from here on out should just be straight XNA and collision detection with the cursor. Oh and I should probably make it work with the left hand too I guess.

It's better with Kinect!