Project Date: Winter 2012

Technologies: Kinect, C#

Back in my freshman year at RIT, I managed to get my hands on a Microsoft Kinect and cobble together a motion-controlled game of Pong. It functioned, but it was a mess. Two years later, I decided I was ready to tackle a serious Kinect project. I began by writing a C# library that wrapped the Kinect SDK, providing simpler setup and easy access to the Kinect’s data streams - color video, depth data, skeleton tracking, and audio input - for use in WPF applications. Included with the library is a demo application, pictured above. I then used used the library in two other projects that were featured in the 2013 Imagine RIT festival.

View the project on GitHub!

The first project was a theremin-esque musical instrument. The user stood in front of the Kinect and used their hands to control the volume and pitch of a sine wave. The right hand controlled the frequency (pitch), and the left hand controlled the amplitude (volume). “Guides” could be enabled to play individual notes, or disabled to glide between all pitches. The sine wave was dynamically generated using the NAudio library.

View the project on GitHub!

The second project was a revamped version of Kinect Pong. Two players stood side-by-side in front of the Kinect, each controlling a paddle with their hands. Each player was tracked independently, so they couldn’t interfere with the other.

View the project on GitHub!