Kinect Studio Revisited

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Extraordinary Robot
Robot
Joined
Jun 27, 2006
Location
Chicago, IL
We've highlighted the Kinect Studio a number of times...


...but it's been over a year since our last post on it, so this post from the Kinect for Windows Team is nice and timely.

Kinect Studio lets you code on the go


...

Luckily for Anup, Kinect Studio makes coding for Kinect for Windows applications a lot easier to pack into a crowded day. Kinect Studio, which is included in the free Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0, allows a developer to record all the data that’s coming into an application through a Kinect sensor. This means that you can capture the data on a series of body movements or hand gestures and then use that data over and over again to debug or enhance your code. Instead of being moored to a Kinect for Windows setup and having to repeatedly act out the user scenario, you have a faithful record of the color image, the depth data, and the three-dimensional relationships. With this data uploaded to your handy laptop, you can squeeze in a little—or a lot—of Kinect coding whenever time permits.

Let’s take a quick look at the main features of Kinect Studio. As shown below, it features four windows: a color viewer, a depth viewer, a 3D viewer, and a control window that lets you record and playback the captured image.

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The color viewer shows exactly what you’d expect: a faithful color image of the user scenario. The depth viewer shows the distance of people and objects in the scene using color: near objects appear red; distant ones are blue; and objects in-between show up in various shades of orange, yellow, and green. The 3D viewer gives you a three-dimensional wire-frame model of the scene, which you can rotate to explore from different perspectives.

The control, or main, window in Kinect Studio is what brings all the magic together. Here’s where you find the controls to record, save, and play back the captured scenario. You can stop and start the recording by moving the cursor along a timeline, and you can select and save sections.

Once you’ve recorded the user scenario and saved it to your laptop in Kinect Studio, you can play it over and over while you modify the code. The developers at Ubi, for instance, employ Kinect Studio to record usability sessions, during which end users act out various scenarios employing Ubi software. They can replay, stop, and start the scenarios frame by frame, to make sure their code is behaving exactly as they want. And since the recordings are accessible from a laptop, developers can test and modify their Kinect for Windows application code just about anywhere.

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For Anup, it means that he can code during the bus ride home or in bed, after his children have gone to sleep. “Kinect Studio doesn’t actually increase the number of hours in the day,” he says, “but it sure feels like it.”

Project Information URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwi...10/kinect-studio-lets-you-code-on-the-go.aspx

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