Finger movements can now be detected by the Kinect, thanks to continuous contributions of the community. When it first came out, the Kinect was only programmed to detect major joints of the body including the palm. But members of the CSAIL LIS and Robot Locomotion Group, a code was released in order for the Kinect to trace even the user’s fingers. This video release shows their “Minority Report” inspired interface and how it utilizes the Kinect’s ability to detect finger movements. Through this video, one can see how images can be modified and viewed through the use of the user’s fingers.
Here is a detailed description by its developers:
“It uses the Kinect sensor from Microsoft, and the recently released libfreenect driver for interfacing with the Kinect in linux. The graphical interface and the hand detection software were written at MIT to interface with the open source robotics package ‘ROS’, developed by Willow Garage. The hand detection software showcases the abilities of the Point Cloud Library (PCL), a part of ROS that MIT has been helping to optimize. The hand detection software is able to distinguish hands and fingers in a cloud of more than 60,000 points at 30 frames per second, allowing natural, real time interaction.”
Now that Kinect can detect finger movements, that adds to the great number of possible programs to be developed with the Kinect. You can go to the project’s homepage for more info and also, the code is available for download there.
