Brekel Kinect v0.40 update (new features!)

A few new highly requested features in this release, namely Motor/LED support and hand rotations!
Ooooh and also some more fixes for the knees/feet when turning around.

Be sure to check out the Help section for how to upgrade the drivers for Motor/LED support.

Not highly tested so consider this a bit more beta than usual 🙂

Enjoy

Monday, March 28th, 2011 Kinect

11 Comments to Brekel Kinect v0.40 update (new features!)

  • Brekel, you’re awesome. You need to be cloned.

  • tri says:

    I installed everything as expected (using the auto installer of yours and then the 0.40 program itself.
    Though trying to upgrade the motor/led driver as mentioned in the help menu, I can;t find ANY folder named
    motor driver
    within “Brekel Kinect” program directory at all!!

    Are you really sure you have included such drivers ????
    (I am using win 7 64 bit)

    Please help!

    • tri says:

      Found the error!
      There is no special “motor driver” as mentioned in the help!
      You just locate to programs dir and proceed

      Btw, please fix help menu text as others may face the same issue

      • brekel says:

        Oooops yeah some of the paths got mixed up when baking the installer, fixed now and reuploaded the v0.40 installer.
        If you got it working no need to redownload, otherwise just redownload and it should work now.

        Thanks for reporting the bug!

  • Davision says:

    Hand rotations! Now i can really wield with my virtual sword! 🙂

  • Torbjörn says:

    Tried the new version, I still get the same problem with knees and feet following the upperbody rotation, even though I keep my hips rigid. This might be a problem from the nite tracker, of course, and perhaps not much you can do about it.

    The dots that used to be on the joints in the depth sensor view now misses to the left on the screen (ie to the right of me), but it draws the joints in the pointcloud window correctly.

    I also get a warning that I only have something like 5-7 fps, unless (!) I enable the pointcloud, in which case I get stable 30 fps.

    • brekel says:

      Indeed I think that is a NITE problem you’re facing, it looks like the source points (white dots in depth view) are also interconnected, rotating the heads also affects the shoulders.

      I’m not sure I get your second remark but I’ll have a look for it, the joints in the pointcloud are the important onse, they are a direct visualization of what gets written to BVH or send to MotionBuilder.

      The FPS warning means your machine is getting bogged down by the pointcloud calculations and would drop frames when capturing/streaming the skeleton.
      Pointcloud calculations seem to be heavy unless you have enough cores/cpu’s so it can be handled by another core.

      When you ignore the error and export a BVH do you notice dropped frames?

      • Torbjörn says:

        About the fps, tonight when I tried it by reasons I cannot understand (as I wrote, unless (!) I _enable_ the pointcloud). Perhaps I should’ve put the exclamation mark behind enable instead. I got the low fps when I had turned the pointcloud _off_.

        I can recreate it today as well. If I turn the pointcloud off, then restart the program (pointcloud off), the fps starts around 10 and drops to 0.0 – still the screen is very responsive, and cpu-usage less than 25% (quad core). If I _enable_ the pointcloud the fps quickly rises to 30 (and cpu-usage increases from 13-22 to 20-27%.

        • Torbjörn says:

          I also managed to understand the problem with the white dots – they are drawn relative to the window size, which means if you scale the application window from the first default they won’t line up with the joints anymore.

          • brekel says:

            Ahaa! That actually makes a lot of sense to me, the point drawing is a separate piece of code from the texture drawing and I only implemented the texture scaling non-proportionally on v0.40
            Again no critical issue, and thanks again for beta-bug-hunting!!

        • brekel says:

          Hmmmm ok that’s pretty weird, indeed if you’ve got a quadcore you should have plenty cores available to run everything in parallel without dropping data.
          Just ignore the warning for now and I may actually disable it for the next version.
          I’ll check what happens on my i7 when I disable the pointcloud, it could be that the fps isn’t calculated correctly with the pointcloud turned off.

          Thanks for the info!

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