Getting Kinected

Yes, the pun...is horrid.

So today I finally decided to hook my Kinect up to my computer.

It's pretty cool.

I can get a rough depth map of the room, 640x480 webcam imagery, cool-looking near-IR imagery, and sound using it. I can also manually tilt it up and down and blink the LED.

How? I thought you'd ask.

LibFreenect is what I used. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. While this article provides a fairly good tutorial, it is a bit outdated. I followed his instructions roughly. His dependency list is fairly good, but I had to build and break it a couple times to find out which other packages I needed. Note that if it breaks on libxyz, you'll need libxyz-dev.

First, I cloned libfreenect's git repository. Entering that directory, one finds a nice cmake-based system that I don't understand at all.

Simply:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
As per the instructions linked above.

Now this is where his instructions are outdated:
cd bin
sudo ./glview
Tadaa! You should now be viewing the depth map and webcam input in a nice big little window. :)

Notice that after the program finishes initialization, it dumps usage information.
w = look up
s = center view
x = look down
f = change view modes (near-IR and two(?) webcam modes
LED controls:
0 = off
1 = green
2 = red
3 = amber
4,5(?) = green, steady blink
6 = red-amber alternating

I has toy. Is happy. Now, to get AJ's pet project working with it...'cuz a Gumstix Tobi with a Fire CoM would totally run it. :D