libfreenect – the pioneer of Kinect middleware

The Kinect sensor was first launched for Xbox 360 game consoles in November 2010, but the first distribution of the Kinect SDK for Windows was released in June 2011. During the interregnum, many hackers and programmers had published their methods to drive and use Kinect features, which were extremely attractive to new media artists and developers. So here come the libfreenect and OpenNI libraries.

libfreenect was born in the race of hacking Microsoft Kinect in early November 2010. Héctor Martin made his code open source on GitHub, a famous social coding host. And this is the rudiment of libfreenect. Now this library is maintained by the OpenKinect community; it can be downloaded at:

• The community page: http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page

• The GitHub source repository : https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect

The libfreenect library can be used with Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Currently, it supports RGB and depth images through the Kinect USB camera. It has a planning analyses library that provides skeleton tracking, hand tracking, audio, point cloud, and 3D reconstruction features. But it has still not been released at the time of writing. libfreenect also supports different programming languages besides C/C++, including C#, Java, Python, Ruby, and ActionScript.

As an open source project, you can contribute to libfreenect at any time under the license of Apache 2.0 or GPL 2.1 (optional).