Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

I’d thought I’d give the Kinect Fusion demos a try. Kinect Fusion allows you to take 3D scans of things by waving your Kinect around. It’s designed to work with the desktop/Windows version of the Kinect but I’d thought I’d give it a go with the Kinect from my old XBox 360.

Turns out it works pretty well. The resolution is pretty low but if you were using one of the new Kinect v2s things would be a lot cripser.

Here is a selfie (holding the Kinect at arms length):

And here is one of son number 1 (who did a fantastic job of sitting very very still):

You if you want to give it a try yourself you can download the Kinect SDK from here.

Actually it’s more what I did last month.

RC simulator

A mate of mine bought himself a swish RC quad-copter. As part of the package he bought Phoenix RC. It is a simulator that allows you to plug your RC controller into a PC and you can then practice flying (and crashing) virtual RC models before tackling the real ones. Very useful and it clearly proved that I should never attempt to fly a real RC helicopter.

Kinect

Believe it or not, I’m actually getting paid to hack a Kinect. Im using the OpenNI framework so hacking really consists of installing the software and then using a nice high-level framework that does all the hard work for you. I’ve been very impressed with the skeleton tracking.  I’ve been able to simultaneously track 3 people with full skeletons without any issues.  This is the guide I used to install the base software. You should also check out the Ogre and Unity demos.

Unity

Whilst tinkering with the Kinect I ran through the Unity 3D platformer tutorial. Unity is very impressive. If you want to create a 3d game I’d start here.  The basic version is free. The cross platform nature of the engine is impressive to.

Auckland Buses app

I finally got around to releasing my Auckland Buses app for Android. It only took a few hours to put together.  I’m experimenting with an ad supported model. The app has about 225 users, averages around 25 impressions a day. So far I’ve made 49c so not really a money maker :) What is interesting is the fairly poor fill rates I get some days.  If you had marketing dollars to spend,  mobile ads might be the way to go as not many people seem to be tapping them.

That’s about it…