Brekel Kinect v0.38 update (severe bugfix!)

Just a single quick bugfix, but a big one!

When rotating around so you ended up facing sidewards or backwards, the torso wouldn’t correctly rotate around, resulting in several misaligned joints.
This happened for both BVH files as well as MotionBuilder streaming and should be fixed now.

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 Kinect

16 Comments to Brekel Kinect v0.38 update (severe bugfix!)

    • brekel says:

      Ooooh sweet, I’ve seen some of the research of MS about their approarch but didn’t have the link to the paper, thanks! Some nice reading material for in the subway to work tomorrow.

      If you’re into this stuff there is some more here:
      http://openkinect.org/wiki/Research_Material

      Now the big question is will MS include their skeleton tracker if they release their SDK this spring……

  • alex says:

    sent my message once again. and on j at brekel don com too

  • Andrew Fung says:

    HI,can the brekel kinect be used in 3dsmax ?

  • Davision says:

    thx a lot for that fix! It was driving me nuts, I thought all the time it was something messed up in Motion Builder and couldnt figure it out.

  • alex says:

    droped u a message on kinect at brekel dot com

  • alex says:

    thanks! tried your 0,36 version, i had a problem with my vidoe adapter, it appeared to be not so powerfull to allow this soft to work properly, so i could make bvh file.
    That’s why i’d like to ask u what kind of bvh does brekel kinekt 0,38 gives in the output?(there are a lot of types of bvh, for each software,bvh for for motion builder doesn’t suite for poser and so on..)

    • brekel says:

      There is a sample BVH available from the menu on the right of this page, which I believe has a naming convention for Biped.

      Generally speaking there are 2 things that vary between BVH files, rotation only vs rotation&translation.
      And differences in naming conventions for the joints. They joint hierarchy is always the same as it comes from the OpenNI/NITE skeleton.

      If you have a program that needs a specific naming convention just mail me a sample file and I’ll see if I can add a preset for it.

  • alex says:

    Hi, Brekel, will it be possible to increase the amount of body joints? now we have 15 main joints, but ipi-studio, foe example, provides soft, which captures up to 22 joints.
    Why developers can’t make more detailed skeleton tracking?

    • brekel says:

      Ipi has their own algorithm for skeleton tracking (which is actually really good!) but afaik it’s not realtime at this moment.
      OpenNI’s is realtime but as you saw it has fewer joints.

      The only way to do more joints is to rewrite the OpenNI skeleton tracker from scratch, which is a really difficult thing to do.
      So that’s one reason why developers haven’t made more detailed skeleton tracking.
      The other reason is that there isn’t that much data available in the single Kinect datastream to begin with. I still find it incredible it’s even possible at all.
      And keep in mind the Kinect was designed for driving GUI’s (well NUI’s is what they call it now), not motion capture.

      If you need higher quality and/or fidelity, simply hire a pro mocap studio.

      • Torbjörn says:

        I tried the new version. I think it works better for the upper body, but I wonder, could it possibly have screved up the rotation on the knees?

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