Skeleton tracking was an aim of the project. I had been using the pre 2013 version of zigfu and was attempting to use it throughout. Mainly as i had it installed before it was updated and became pay for to remove the water mark. In the previous version its easy to do skeleton tracking but the sample scene requires the user to calibrate by holding up their arms which is not an option for this project. I had a lot of difficulty getting the tracking working and i’m sure i was doing something wrong but the plugin was largely undocumented at the time.
I eventually upgraded to the new paid version as it was so easy to have multiple avatars created from prefabs and have each prefab as a skeleton. Plus the new scripts are just much better named / organised and easy to extend. It just made the final avatar creation a lot more straightforward and i’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in messing about with the kinect. Personally, i want to try my own skinned character in the future to see how it looks.
As i was struggling with the tracking i did find some interesting things. I was trying to merge hand tracking with the user radar zigfu sample scenes and also trying some things with ‘mesh from geometry’. Completely no use to this project as i found out but fun none the less. Particularly having a light follow your hand in a dark room with a projector is great. You basically have a virtual light follow your hand meaning the project aims a beam of light at your hand. Its basically real time projection mapping which i suppose is the same tech as microsoft’s newly patented holodeck.
[button url=”http://gizmodo.com/microsofts-crazy-illumiroom-more-details-about-a-real-484384917″ color=”black” ]microsoft holodeck[/button] (only a quick ref here)
realtime mesh and light following hand
Heres how it worked in the new version:
Assign the transforms to the zig skeleton script
Make the avatar a prefab
Have the avatar prefab instantiate from the zig engage all users script
I suppose the point of this post is that when your trying to get something to work you end up going down a lot of blind alleys but you learn an awful lot from the failures and practical experience counts for much more than theory, even if it didn’t work exactly how you thought it would..
