Let's get familiar with the technologies we will use today...
Quartz Composer
Quartz Composer (QC) is a node-based graphical programming language. If that sounds complex, it simply means that you will be connecting boxes with squiggly lines instead of writing code yourself. Quartz Composer is a powerful programming language that will allow us to communicate with other technological devices such as the Microsoft Kinect. This Software works very similar to Scratch; they are both visual programming tools in which you drag, drop, and connect functions. The building blocks for Quartz Composer are called Patches and some of these patches receive data from sources such as microphones, cameras, and in our case, the Microsoft Kinect. The receivers of information are called Macro Patches. For example, in this lesson we will be using the Kinect Skeleton Macro Patch, which produces a numerical structure of the body coming from the Kinect Camera. Microsoft Kinect The Microsoft Kinect is a camera that works very different to a normal camera. The Kinect is the only camera that can actually "see". What do we mean by "see"? The Kinect can detect depth, motion, and recognize body and facial gestures the same way that our eyes do. In comparison with a normal camera that only produces an image, the Kinect can actually interpret those images! The Kinect recognizes moving bodies, gestures, and objects. In our activity, our goal is to program the Kinect so that the body information it detects become something very fun such as a puppet. Synapse In order to establish a connection between the Kinect camera and Quartz Composer we will use an application called Synapse. Synapse's job is to simply let us obtain data directly from the Kinect camera, then we will manipulate this numerical data in Quartz Composer to create a virtual puppet Without Synapse, Quartz Composer will not be able to receive the information it needs to create our virtual puppet. |