Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot

by Greg Borenstein

This detailed, hands-on guide provides the technical and conceptual information you need to build cool applications with Microsoft’s Kinect, the amazing motion-sensing device that enables computers to see. Through half a dozen meaty projects, you’ll learn how to create gestural interfaces for software, use motion capture for easy 3D character animation, 3D scanning for custom fabrication, and many other applications. Perfect for hobbyists, makers, artists, and gamers, Making Things See shows you how to build every project with inexpensive off-the-shelf components, including the open source Processing programming language and the Arduino microcontroller. You’ll learn basic skills that will enable you to pursue your own creative applications with Kinect.

Genres: Programming, Design, Technology, Computers, Science, Games, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2012

Reviews

[Kevin Kirkhoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really good book in that it was very easy to install a few libraries and an SDK and take off running...or posing. The author (Greg Borenstein) made it very easy to read and understand. He used OpenNI, SimpleOpenNI, and a language called Processing to very quickly and easily begin interfacing with a Kinect. I did this on my Macintosh, so I had to use an Xbox Kinect instead of a Windows Kinect.

Each chapter either built on the previous one or one from several chapters back. It explained through examples how the Kinect worked, how to use the depth (3D) data to interact with objects in space, cloud points, vector and point mapping, and high-level gesture recognition. While all the chapters were not applicable (5 and 6) to what I need to use the Kinect for right now, the ones that I did read (1-4) gave me a good basis to take what he did and begin to put together a good demonstration project.

I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to explore gesture recognition as a new and interesting alternative to the mouse.

[Steve Teeri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to take the dip into using the Microsoft Kinect for custom video installations and video games for a while. Seeing this book and reading through its chapters, it seemed like a good place to take the plunge into Kinect hacking. Being published by O'Reilly as part of their Make series, I felt like it would be a well vetted and tested resource on the subject. My hopes were all realized in a number of projects described and tested out in my library's makerspace. There are some technical hoops you need to jump through to get the Kinect to be recognized and and usable on a Mac computer. Making Things See does a very good job of walking you through this process. Within two days of reading this book, I had a 3D mesh world, with grafted real color and had the Kinect hooked up to Scratch and playing videos games. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in seeing all you can do with a Kinect controller.

[Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can get pretty much everything you need to get started with Kinect from this book, but you need to take some things into account.
First, this book was written mostly for beginners with commercial operative systems,the installation part for Linux based OS´s is pretty much "deal with it yourself" oriented. For most 32-bit computers this is not much of a problem, but it might get messy with 64-bit ones.
The other thing, this book is based on the old libraries of OpenNI, not the new ones. If you are planning to use OpenNI 2 and NITE 2, you might want to know that you will need to work around some examples and modify the code to match the migration to the new libraries first. Once you understand the concepts, it should be easy anyway.
Great book.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro perfecto para aprender a usar el Kinect, con la libreria openNI, solo encuentro 2 problemas:
1- solo esta para programar en processing (java)
2- no ensenya toda toda la libreria de kinect de openNI, un cookbook estaria muy bien.