Preface
As a step towards interacting with users through the physical world, learn how to write NIUI-based applications or motion-controlled games.
OpenNI Cookbook is here to show you how to start developing Natural Interaction UI for your applications or games with high-level APIs while, at the same time, accessing raw data from different sensors of different devices that are supported by OpenNI using low-level APIs.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started, will teach you how to install OpenNI along with NiTE and shows you how to prepare an environment for writing an OpenNI-based application.
Chapter 2, OpenNI and C++, explains how to start programming with OpenNI, from basic steps such as creating a project in Visual Studio to initializing and accessing different devices and sensors.
Chapter 3, Using Low-level Data, is an important chapter of this book, as we are going to cover reading and handling output of basic sensors from each device.
Chapter 4, More about Low-level Outputs, shows how you can customize the frame data right from the device itself, including mirroring and cropping.
Chapter 5, NiTE and User Tracking, will start using the Natural Interaction features of NiTE. As a first step, you will learn how to detect users on the scene and their properties.
Chapter 6, NiTE and Hands Tracking, will cover topics such as recognizing and tracking hand movements.
Chapter 7, NiTE and Skeleton Tracking, will be covering the most important features of NiTE: skeleton tracking and recognizing users' skeleton joints.
What you need for this book
You need to have Visual Studio 2010 to perform the recipes given in this book. You will also need to download OpenNI 2 and NiTE from their official websites. If you are going to use Kinect, you may need to download the Kinect SDK from Microsoft's website as well.
Who this book is for
OpenNI Cookbook is a book for both starters and professionals in NIUI, for people who want to write serious applications or games, and for people who want to experience and start working with NIUI. Even OpenNI 1 and OpenNI 1.x programmers who want to move to the new versions of OpenNI can use this book as a starting point.
This book uses C++ as its primary language; so for reading and understanding you only need to have a basic knowledge of C or C++.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Also, we checked if the initializing process ended without any error by creating a variable of type openni::Status."
A block of code is set as follows:
printf("OpenNI Version is %d.%d.%d.%d",
OpenNI::getVersion().major,
OpenNI::getVersion().minor,
OpenNI::getVersion().maintenance,
OpenNI::getVersion().build);New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "From the File menu, select New and then New Project."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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