Kinect
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Yesterday I was reminded that 200 sessions from Autodesk University 2013 were recorded and have been made available on-demand – for free! Many great classes are available as well as the keynote and innovation forum sessions. I believe you need to create a free Autodesk account to view them, if you don't already happen to have one. In fact, here's a screengrab from the closing keynote which happens to include a photo (taken by Shaan Hurley, of course) of me with Scott McFarlane (love the sweatshirt 🙂 and Owen Wengerd at the Blogger's Social. I did a quick search for…
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During the general wind-down before Autodesk's annual "week of rest", I've been spending some time this week getting more of my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples working with the pre-release Kinect for Windows 2.0 device and SDK. Things are actually working pretty well: all samples – barring those that rely on capabilities that aren't yet part of the SDK – are functional and some have even been enhanced based on new capabilities of the 2.0 device. For instance, I've reworked the "piping" sample (the one that extrudes a circular profile through 3D space) to make use of the distance between the palm…
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I've been sick in bed since returning from AU2013 – the fever I experienced on Thursday morning, before travelling home in the evening, was apparently due to bacterial bronchitis, and I've been coughing really badly over the last few days. At least the fever has passed, but I did have to cancel my plans to travel to the Munich DevDay. It would have just been too much for me to be on a series of trains for a total of 7 hours each way. Next year. Anyway, here's a quick post I've had sitting around that I've just augmented with…
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I'm sitting in Heathrow Terminal 5, waiting for my connecting flight to Geneva. A good time to reflect back on another intense week at Autodesk University. I arrived in Las Vegas for this year's AU last Saturday evening, flying via the UK on a flight that seemed full with AU attendees (even if Autodesk employees were limited to 20 per flight). Among others I bumped into Tilo Pfliegner from kubit and the CAD Professor himself, Sunith Babu. I've really found that having the extra day in Las Vegas – which I usually spend shopping for the family and hanging out…
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I was hoping to get the Kinect for Windows 2.0 pre-release developer kit in time for AU – so I can talk about it intelligently, even if I don't end up demoing it – so when the UPS delivery man showed up, yesterday, I was very happy. As always, it started with a simple box: Which, once opened, revealed some nice monochrome graphics: And the device itself, of course (tripod is model's own ;-). The addition of the tripod screw-hole on the bottom is very welcome: I ended up buying…
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As mentioned in yesterday's post, on Monday I spent a few hours in the early morning at the local archeological museum, the Laténium. While this is nowhere near the scale of the Smithsonian, it is the largest archeological museum in Switzerland and is well known by people in the field, especially those interested in La Tène culture. I love the Laténium – our kids often seem to go there for birthday parties, which certainly beat the ones held at the local McDonalds – and so I was delighted to get to go "behind closed doors" (the museum is closed on…
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For those of you unable to attend AU 2013 in person, the keynote sessions and a small number of this year's classes will be streamed live. And they're free to attend: you just need to be registered with AU Online. I'm lucky to be presenting one of only 11 classes that are scheduled to be broadcast over the web as well as having a live audience: it seems my Kinect Fusion session is the only developer-centric class that's been selected for this year's AU Online, which is quite the honour. Hopefully I'll do it justice! A good piece of related…
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Yesterday I presented a condensed sneak peek of my upcoming AU sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion to colleagues in the Neuchâtel office (I'll do the same at our office in Gümligen next week). It was good to make sure my various demos are working well in time for AU, as well as creating some awareness around the possibilities presented by these two technologies. We attempted a live capture of a chair using Kinect Fusion, which actually came out surprisingly well (the Kinect's USB cable popped out as I was trying to scan the chair's back, but the command…
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Something you realise quite early on when working with the Kinect Fusion component in the Microsoft Kinect SDK is that it's really meant to integrate into a 2D UI: it takes care of rendering the volume that's being mapped, and you simply have to integrate the generated bitmap somewhere into your app's UI. The primary benefit of this approach is its low latency: it all happens very quickly and the only data you need to move from the runtime into your app is the bitmap itself. With 3D systems such as AutoCAD, though, you really want to take the 3D…
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A few weeks ago the Kinect SDK was updated to version 1.8. I'd been eagerly awaiting this update for one reason, in particular: aside from receiving some updates to provide more robust tracking – something that was very much needed – Kinect Fusion has now been updated to include realistic colours in the output. There are some additional SDK enhancements, such as a background removal APIs (good for greenscreening) and HTML support (handy for interactive kiosks), but the ones that interest me most relate to Kinect Fusion. There are a few new Kinect Fusion samples that I need to take…