to the buttery depth(array)s

UPDATE(20120313):
{

You also need this plugin as well.  If you notice Unity throwing DLLNotFoundExceptions and grousing about MSRKINECTNUI.DLL, you probably don't have it installed.

KinectPlugin.zip

}
        Man, I wish I could talk about all the awesome stuff I saw at GDC, but sadly, most of my GDC was prepping for my talks, running around organizing events, some modicum of time lost commuting from San Jose to San Francisco, and trying not to suffer a total breakdown overall.  Nah, I make it sound worse than it really was, i think the most taxing part of the conference had...not much to do with the actual conference, tho it was def tangential.  As much as I'd like to whine about it here, that's another post for another blog for a much more inebriated state of mind.  I should have my GDC slides up in the very near future, so stay tuned.  I may do some highlights here or something like that.

        What I can show you is these awesome pictures from some of the Tech Art related events.  The trend of Tech Art presence of GDC escalating continued with 2012 in spades, as the photos from Boot Camp and Decompression can attest to:









Boot Camp about to get underway, another great crowd!


Decompressing after the show Friday...


...started with about 15 people back in 2010(?)...


...logged about 50 in 2012.  Not bad!
        But now it's back to the real world and demo crunch, although I have to admit this hasn't been a horrible demo crunch at all, and in fact I can probably blame my own poor scheduling.  Admittedly, I can also blame the fact that I didn't think the problem through and didn't write my own Kinect wrapper back when I started.  Yeah yeah, there are a few out there, but I'm really not sold on any of them.  I used the zigFu one for a bit, but I think i'm philosophically opposed to using that one.  It crashes Unity, it's a known bug, and it seems the answer is "It'll be fixed when our commercial version comes out".  I appreciate everyone needing to make a buck but...no.

        So we decided to take a look at some of the MS SDK based solutions, despite the Microsoft stuff seeming to be a mixed bag just because it feels like there's been so much splintering between SDK releases.  I did find a version from the good folks at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), an organization at which I've had the pleasure of speaking, as well as the opportunity to work with many of alums.  Having failed miserably to get a hand tracking based solution working, we decided to focus a bit on skeletal tracking instead.  Now, I feel more and more like this was a failed design decision more than a fail of technology, but at this point, I'll try anything once. Just need to get something usable by Tuesday.

        Quick aside, I really feel at this point like it's my duty to write a good wrapper for Kinect to Unity.  I feel like all the ones that have been made available to date have been written by people who have more experience using SDKs and less experience developing SDKs.  This could just be the fact that there hasn't been alot of feedback, but anyway, I digress...

        So head over to the MS Kinect - MS SDK page at ETC's Unity3d web and grab a few files.  You'll need at minumum:

• Microsoft Kinect SDK - Grab the one on the page, as this is a beta release.  From what I've heard, the projects don't work with the official release.  Also, i've only loosely verified this, but the drivers in this package only work with XBox 360 Kinects.
• Kinect Wrapper Example Project - Basic stuff to get you going without too much other overhead
• DirectX June 2010 SDK - Some of the samples in the Kinect SDK require this.  If you get a redistributable error on installing (s1023 or something like that), uninstall all VS2010 redistributables later than 30139 and try again.  Should be good to go.
• DirectX End-User Runtime - I believe some of the Unity samples require this

        Install everything in no particular order, plug your Kinect in, and you'll be good to go.  Windows Update might toss you some noise about looking for updated drivers (because like everything MS, it thinks you're stupid), but that probably isn't too big a deal.  Next installment we'll talk about some of the flow in and out of the Unity Kinect wrapper...Fun fun!  I'm using this mainly as a way to step through some key bits of the Nui namespace in prep for more kinect/depth camera work coming up.  I'm working on the final kinect camera driver the next two days, so I'll finally be able to toss that up as part of the wrapper exploration.  It's a fairly simple jumping off point so...anyway.  Sleep comes.