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Greg Duncan
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Todays project by James Ashley takes us to an often visited place, controlling PowerPoint presentations with a Kinect, yet pushes farther, building on the latest features in the Kinect for Windows SDK v1.7 (and more)
Kinect PowerPoint Mapper
I just published a Kinect mapping tool for PowerPoint allowing users to navigate through a PowerPoint slide deck using gestures. It’s here on CodePlex: https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/ . There are already a lot of these out there, by the way – one of my favorites is the one Josh Blake published.
So why did I think the world needed one more?
The main thing is that, prior to the release of the Kinect SDK 1.7, controlling a slide deck with a Kinect was prone to error and absurdity. Because they are almost universally written for the swipe gesture, prior PowerPoint controllers using Kinect had a tendency to recognize any sort of hand waving gesture as an event. Consequently, as a speaker innocently gesticulated through his point the slides would begin to wander on their own.
The Kinect for Windows team added the grip gesture as well as the push gesture in the SDK 1.7. This required several months of computer learning work to get these recognizers to work effectively in a wide variety of circumstances. They are extremely solid at this point.
The Kinect PowerPoint Mapper I just uploaded to CodePlex takes advantage of the grip gesture to implement a grab-and-throw for PowerPoint navigation. This effectively disambiguates navigation gestures from other symbolic gestures a presenter might use during the course of a talk.
I see the Kinect PowerPoint Mapper serving several audiences:
1. It’s for people who just want a more usable Kinect-navigation tool for PowerPoint.
2. It’s a reference application for developers who want to learn how they can pull the grip and the push recognizers out of the Microsoft Kinect controls and use them in combination with other gestures. ...
3. The Mapper is configuration based, so users can actually use it with PC apps other than PowerPoint simply by remapping gestures to keystrokes. The current mappings in KinectKeyMapper.exe.config look like this:
4. The project ought to be extended as more gesture recognizers become available from Microsoft or as people just find good algorithms for gesture recognizers over time. ...
Project Information URL: http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/post/2013/07/17/Kinect-PowerPoint-Mapper.aspx, https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/
Project Download URL: https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/releases/
Project Source URL: https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest
Contact Information:
Continue reading...
Kinect PowerPoint Mapper
I just published a Kinect mapping tool for PowerPoint allowing users to navigate through a PowerPoint slide deck using gestures. It’s here on CodePlex: https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/ . There are already a lot of these out there, by the way – one of my favorites is the one Josh Blake published.
So why did I think the world needed one more?
The main thing is that, prior to the release of the Kinect SDK 1.7, controlling a slide deck with a Kinect was prone to error and absurdity. Because they are almost universally written for the swipe gesture, prior PowerPoint controllers using Kinect had a tendency to recognize any sort of hand waving gesture as an event. Consequently, as a speaker innocently gesticulated through his point the slides would begin to wander on their own.
The Kinect for Windows team added the grip gesture as well as the push gesture in the SDK 1.7. This required several months of computer learning work to get these recognizers to work effectively in a wide variety of circumstances. They are extremely solid at this point.
The Kinect PowerPoint Mapper I just uploaded to CodePlex takes advantage of the grip gesture to implement a grab-and-throw for PowerPoint navigation. This effectively disambiguates navigation gestures from other symbolic gestures a presenter might use during the course of a talk.
I see the Kinect PowerPoint Mapper serving several audiences:
1. It’s for people who just want a more usable Kinect-navigation tool for PowerPoint.
2. It’s a reference application for developers who want to learn how they can pull the grip and the push recognizers out of the Microsoft Kinect controls and use them in combination with other gestures. ...
3. The Mapper is configuration based, so users can actually use it with PC apps other than PowerPoint simply by remapping gestures to keystrokes. The current mappings in KinectKeyMapper.exe.config look like this:
4. The project ought to be extended as more gesture recognizers become available from Microsoft or as people just find good algorithms for gesture recognizers over time. ...
Project Information URL: http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/post/2013/07/17/Kinect-PowerPoint-Mapper.aspx, https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/
Project Download URL: https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/releases/
Project Source URL: https://k4wppt.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest
Contact Information:
- Blog: http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/
- Twitter: @jamesashley
Continue reading...