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Introduction
It is customary to preface a work with an explanation of the author’s aim, why he wrote the book, and
the relationship in which he believes it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the same
subject. In the case of a technical work, however, such an explanation seems not only superfluous but,
in view of the nature of the subject-matter, even inappropriate and misleading. In this sense, a technical
book is similar to a book about anatomy. We are quite sure that we do not as yet possess the subject-
matter itself, the content of the science, simply by reading around it, but must in addition exert
ourselves to know the particulars by examining real cadavers and by performing real experiments.
Technical knowledge requires a similar exertion in order to achieve any level of competence.
Besides the reader’s desire to be hands-on rather than heads-down, a book about Kinect
development offers some additional challenges due to its novelty. The Kinect seemed to arrive exnihilo
in November of 2010 and attempts to interface with the Kinect technology, originally intended only to be
used with the XBOX gaming system, began almost immediately. The popularity of these efforts to hack
the Kinect appears to have taken even Microsoft unawares.
Several frameworks for interpreting the raw feeds from the Kinect sensor have been released
prior to Microsoft’s official reveal of the Kinect SDK in July of 2011 including libfreenect developed by
the OpenKinect community and OpenNI developed primarily by PrimeSense, vendors of one of the key
technologies used in the Kinect sensor. The surprising nature of the Kinect’s release as well as
Microsoft’s apparent failure to anticipate the overwhelming desire on the part of developers, hobbyists
and even research scientists to play with the technology may give the impression that the Kinect SDK is
hodgepodge or even a briefly flickering fad.
The gesture recognition capabilities made affordable by the Kinect, however, have been
researched at least since the late 70’s. A brief search on YouTube for the phrase “put that there” will
bring up Chris Schmandt’s1979 work with the MIT Media Lab demonstrating key Kinect concepts such
as gesture tracking and speech recognition. The influence of Schmandt’s work can be seen in Mark
Lucente’s work with gesture and speech recognition in the 90’s for IBM Research on a project called
DreamSpace. These early concepts came together in the central image from Steven Speilberg’s 2002 film
Minority Reportthat captured viewers imaginations concerning what the future should look like. That
image was of Tom Cruise waving his arms and manipulating his computer screens without touching
either the monitors or any input devices. In the middle of an otherwise dystopic society filled with
robotic spiders, ubiquitous marketing and panopticon police surveilence, Steven Speilberg offered us a
vision not only of a possible technological future but of a future we wanted.
Although Minority Report was intended as a vision of technology 50 years in the future, the first
concept videos for the Kinect, code-named Project Natal, started appearing only seven years after the
movie’s release. One of the first things people noticed about the technology with respect to its cinematic
predecessor was that the Kinect did not require Tom Cruise’s three-fingered, blue-lit gloves to function.
We had not only caught up to the future as envisioned byMinority Report in record time but had even
surpassed it.
The Kinect is only new in the sense that it has recently become affordable and fit for mass-
production. As pointed out above, it has been anticipated in research circles for over 40 years. The
CplusEx2015-05-04不错，值得学习
shenxinshan6211072013-06-18非常好的介绍Kinect开发环境的书，原版，值得下载。
KyleLin7402013-06-13看起来不错，但是他里面用的是旧的SDK， 难跟着做，就没看下去了，熟了之后再回头看算法思路
aazz9111192013-08-18kinect入门参考 实用！
