Chapter 4. Skeletal Motion and Face Tracking

Capturing and tracking skeleton images of one or two people is one of the most exciting features of Kinect development. It can transform many ideas to reality, including gesture recognition, multi-touch emulation, data-driven character animations, and even some advanced techniques such as motion capture and model reconstruction. The skeletal mapping work in every Kinect device is actually done by a microprocessor in the sensor (or directly by the Xbox core), and the results can be retrieved using corresponding APIs for use in our own applications.

The Microsoft Kinect SDK 1.5 also includes a new face tracking module that can track the position and rotation of our heads, and the shapes of our eyes and mouth. It even provides APIs to compute a virtual face mesh, which can be directly rendered in the 3D world. We will also introduce these excellent functionalities in this chapter, although they are not quite related to our planned Fruit Ninja game...