Skeletons, Kinect and Halloween – my Introduction to Kinect talk

On the 18th – 19th and 20th of October I was attending the first ever Baltic Techdays. A very busy few days – 3 conferences, 3 countries, 3 keynote presentations and 3 full-length sessions.

Superman Academy

At the Keynotes, I introduced the Kinect sensor and showed off a couple of demos. The last demo was our Kinect Maps application, which the audience loved - except in Estonia, where it didn’t work due to a last minute configuration change that seemed harmless. (Note to self: don’t allow any changes before a presentation. None!)

John’s SkeletonControl

I had two other demos. The first one was pretty basic, showing off the Depth and the RGB cameras of Kinect. The second one is more complex –  it shows how Skeleton Tracking works. I used the SkeletonControl from John O’Brien, which in turn uses the BoneBehavior I wrote…

Halloween skeletons! Scaaaaaryyy

This demo also has some speech recognition built in. If you say “Hey Kinect, I want to be scary”, the screen will flash, show some pumpkins, and the skeleton will turn into a real skeleton:

In my talk, I showed how both demos were working, and how the look of the skeleton was changed to the more scary version using Expression Blend and the power of Behaviors. In the Baltics, not too many people were familiar with WPF or Expression Blend, so I hope this demo also illustrated the power of WPF templates…

My slides (which also deal with Kinect UX) and the source code for the demos can be downloaded from SkyDrive. The talks were recorded, I will put up another blog post when they become available.

I would like to thank Tautvydas Dagys for inviting me to the conferences and the awesome organization - and also Alan Mendelevich for taking me to the Old City in Lithuania, and thus making it possible to play tourist for half a day after a whole week of conferencing.

Happy Halloween!