Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Early Prototype Sample

Just a follow up to Melissa's post, in this post I've embedded the flash file we used for our proof-of-concept prototype. If you have a Kinect running on your PC is will work as intended right in the browser, otherwise you can hover over the buttons and pretend you have a Kinect :-/

Read more to try out our flash prototype!

Monday, May 7, 2012

Progression of Gestural User Interface

A visual tour of the gestural interface progression January 2012-May2012. 
This tour will take you from Initial research and groupings until the high fidelity mockup used in our final interface.



Click read more below to watch how the transformation happened in pictures...

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Convincing Xbox360 Kinect to Play Nice with a Small Apartment

Whenever I am discussing our NUI CDR project with someone for the first time I normally need to explain to them we are using the “PC” version of Kinect, rather than the “Xbox” version, and often times people seem surprised there’s a difference. The PC version primarily exists for software developers to build on, and the Xbox version is targeted at end users looking to control their gaming console. It should be mentioned there's plenty of open-source software out there to hack the Xbox Kinect using a PC, and some may say it was this growing trend that encouraged Microsoft to release a version for PC with an official SDK. In any case, it seemed like a good idea to buy a Kinect for my Xbox360 to learn more about using gesture interactions and to gain a familiarity with what game developers have been serving to their audience up to this point. While some reading this may be quick to accuse me of gaming during times I should be working, it should be noted that this is research, yes I am playing Xbox and it is research!

Oh yeah, by the way, before we even touch any gaming there's a little calibration process...