The Kinect Device is Democratizing Robotics

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Why the Kinect Device is democratizing robotics

I recently attended a Robotics event at BotNDolly. The founder showed me some really cool stuff. BotNDolly’s technology gives filmmakers and artists the power of robotic motion control without the complexity. A Maya-based workflow makes it easy to animate the physical world, and a suite of “BD” tools plug into the workflow of a modern film set. Record the first take of a shoot and then use a variety of sensors to track the camera in a 3 dimensional space. The resulting x, y, z space can then be brought into Maya and refined. Robots are not just the stars of film – they now do the filming too.

At that same event there was a panel discussion. If you ask a panel of robot experts what technology greatly helped the field of robotics, Kinect may very well be brought up by more than just one pantelist (at least that is what I witnessed). Developers get all the crazy math done for them by the device, no need to do weird 3-dimensional trigonometric math with velocities and angles so that you can figure out the motion of a body. Kinect delivers that to you on a silver platter.

So I am therefore hosting a robotics event in San Francisco on 8/1. I’ve got a line up of 5 amazing speakers, including some stuff with the Kinect team at MS.

Only a few seats remain for Democratizing Robotics - Build your own virtual agent https://www.meetup.com/software/events/129686562/

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I want to do some type of Kinect demo with the cloud. Maybe I’ll write, “Who the <$@#!$> is eating my Tomatoes App,” that uses infrared to spy on my back garden to see who is eating my ripening tomatoes. The app will take a photo every so many seconds and then I’ll create a time lapsed video. I’ll automatically upload the images to the cloud at night. Some may infrared because I’m also worried about Deer, Racoons, Skunks, and more. The cloud will track and store the photos and hopefully maintain a time lapsed video of them that I can get a link to from an email.

So I laid out some ground work

The links below are to samples that demonstrate a feature. Notice that the language and framework support is spelled out, as of 7/19/2013. This is the starting point for the aspiring Kinect developer. I was inspired by the Kinect at one point, using it as a baby monitor. Well, now I need a garden monitor.

My Original Post https://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/kinect/Baby-NUI-Using-the-Kinect-as-a-Baby-Monitor

I wanted to chart out the learning path I’m looking at for Kinect. This seems like a great place.

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Sample C# C++ VB WPF DirectX Additional information
Audio Basics https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj131039 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj131038.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj131049.aspx Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Audio Capture Raw No https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh855374.aspx No No No Available in 1.7.0
Audio Explorer No https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251722 No No Yes Available in 1.7.0
Basic Interactions https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=262371 No No No No Available in 1.6.0
Color Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251726 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251725 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251727 Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Controls Basics https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188701.aspx No No Yes No https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188671.aspx
Depth Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251730 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251728 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251731 Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Depth No https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251733 No No Yes Available in 1.7.0
Depth with Color No https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251734 No No Yes Available in 1.7.0
Face Tracking https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251735 No No Yes No https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx
Face Tracking Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251736 No No Yes No https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx
Face Tracking Visualization No https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251737 No No Yes https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx
Green Screen https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251739 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251738 No Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Infrared Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=262318 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=262319 No Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Kinect Bridge with MATLAB Basics No https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188693.aspx No No Yes Available in 1.7.0
Kinect Bridge With OpenCV Basics No https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188694.aspx No No Yes Available in 1.7.0
Kinect Explorer https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251740 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188699.aspx Yes Yes No Available in 1.7.0
Kinect Fusion Basics https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188700.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188696.aspx No Yes Yes https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188670.aspx
Kinect Fusion Explorer https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn193975.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188697.aspx No Yes Yes https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188670.aspx
Shape Game https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251741 No No Yes No Available in 1.7.0
Skeletal Viewer No https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251742 No No Yes Available in 1.6.0
Skeleton Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251744 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251743 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251745 Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Slideshow Gestures https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251746 No No Yes No Available in 1.6.0
Speech Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251748 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251747 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251749 Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
Tic Tac Toe https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251750 No No Yes No Available in 1.7.0
WPF D3D Interop https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=259759 https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=259759 No Yes Yes Available in 1.7.0
XNA Basics https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251751 No No Yes No https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23714