Getting started with the Kinect

Getting started with the Kinect

The Kinect is a fantastic piece of equipment but sometimes it can be a bit of a pain getting it working with your music making program of choice. We have created this short tutorial to help you start making music with the Kinect as quickly as possible!

This was tested on a Macintosh – OS 10.8.1 using an X-Box 360 Kinect attached via USB. If your using a different system and this work out for you please let us know, we would like to compile a supported systems section for other users to reference.

 

  • Plug your Kinect in to your computer and the wall, as previously mentioned this was tested with the X-Box 360 Kinect not Microsoft Kinect for Windows.
  • Make your way over to ZigFu and click “Download for Mac”.
  • Once you’ve downloaded ZigFu go through the installation, afterwards it’ll open up your web browser and you can have a little play with the Kinect and a virtual punchbag.
  • Now that your bored with that, check which version of OS X your running. Go to the Apple in the top left hard corner of your screen and click “About this Mac”. If your running anything later than OS 10.6 you’ll need to install “XQuartz”, go here and do just that.
  • Now log out and log back in to your computer.
  • Now you’ll need to download our tool collection from here and unzip it.
  • Once this is done its time to open OSCeleton – the application that will carry out all of the skeletal tracking – the next six steps cover this.
  • Unzip “osceleton-v1.2.1_OSX.zip”.
  • Now go to the “applications” folder on your computer.
  • Look for the “utilities” folder inside applications.
  • Open up the application called “Terminal”.
  • Now drag the unzipped “osceleton-v1.2.1_OSX” file onto the terminal icon in your dock
  • Terminal should now look something the picture on the left, move around in front of the Kinect and the terminal will change to the picture on the right once it sees you:
  • Now your ready to make some music! Go to the “Examples & fun” folder.
  • If you like MIDI and you are on OS X download a copy of  OSCulator and once its installed open the “remap-osceleton.oscd” we’ve included. Now you can start turning your movements into MIDI messages.
  • If you use Processing open up “Processing examples”; install the libraries into your Processing libraries folder (this is an old copy of pbox2d – the new version caused error messages) and open up the examples in the “examples” file. The examples all originated from Githhub and were authored by Tony Gonçalves.
  • If you use Max/MSP open up “maxpatch_kinect.maxpat” by the fantastic Thom Judson.
or if you want to copy the code and paste it into your patcher look here
———-begin_max5_patcher———-

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———–end_max5_patcher———–

So thats it! Post any questions, comments and suggestions below, we’ll do our best to answer them.