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!

Ideo's Kinect Physics Demo

Ideo has a Kinect physics demo on their Vimeo page, it's been up for a while but somehow slipped under our radar until now. This is a great demonstration of the accuracy the sensor is capable of:



Recently we've been doing some brainstorming about things like switches and wheels, virtual representation of controls with limited affordances that a user can interact with naturally, watching this validates some of our discussion as it seems the sensor should certainly be capable of those things.

Right now we're in the early stages of prototyping with a group meeting scheduled for tomorrow night at the CDR, next update I will fill in the details of how we got to this point and what we are hoping to achieve, stay tuned!

Kinect and PC Arrived

Our hardware arrived earlier this month so we all met up at the CDR to dig into it on March 4th. After we got everything hooked up we quickly noticed the computer wasn't really noticing the Kinect at all, it became clear to us right away that we needed to manipulate code in the Software Development Kit (SDK) to really get started. It was a productive start to our project, more info and images after the break.

Kinect at the Grocery Store

In addition to posting about our NUI/CDR project I want to use this blog to share other innovative uses of the Kinect hardware. Here's a video demonstrating some Kinect technology being used with a grocery cart, apparently Whole Foods is testing this prototype:

The system will recognize a user's frequent shopper card to identify them, it then gives the option to load a shopping list, follows the shopper automatically, and then scans items as they are placed in the cart.

Welcome to the NUI Blog!

This blog is to document our graduate design work at the University of Kansas (KU) relating to Natural User Interfaces (NUI). The actual timeline of the class will run for the Spring 2012 semester, but chances are this may turn into a thesis or extended project that spans far beyond that. Our immediate task is to fearlessly dive into this and share our progress here.