Unless you’ve been away from the internet for the last year, you should know by now that the Microsoft Kinect has come along way in terms of homebrewers and geeks alike. Several months ago, I posted an article showing you how to interact with your Kinect using C#. Today, I want to introduce you to a new open source project for the Kinect called “DepthJS”. Coming from those geniuses over at MIT, researchers Aaron Zinman, Doug Fritz, Greg Elliott, and Roy Shilkrot have created a Javascript framework that allows you to interact with your Kinect directly from your web browser.
The idea is extremely cool! They’re providing a browser plugin for Safari and Chrome that will allow you to do things like playing games to running specific utilities for specific sites and do it all with simple gestures which are picked up by your Kinect. The DepthJS API currently provides standard gesture recognition for things like presence of hand, removal of hand, hand movement, and swipe up, down, left, and right. The framework uses the open source libfreenect drivers and OpenCV in C++ and wraps the Kinect code using Javascript to provide a browser plugin for quick interactions with the Kinect.
With this kind of computer-user interaction, the possibilities are endless. I can already envision several websites and applications that are guaranteed to popup using this technology.The DepthJS framework is open source under the AGPL license and you can get the source code from here. You can also head over to the DepthJS website for a quick video from the DepthJS crew by clicking here. So, if you’re into the whole computer vision scene, be sure to checkout DepthJS and give it a try for yourself.
Related Posts
