Scatter The World

A simple interactive visual effect using Microsoft's Kinect and Cinder.

Currently the system is limited to 5000 particles. When I get the chance, I intend to implement a particle system that uses location binning to limit particle interactions to nearest neighbor interactions. This will probably raise the particle capacity to 14k particles @ 30fps. GPU based techniques would be needed to implement a larger number of particles.

Requirements

To date, the only environment I have tested this on is the following:

• Mac OS X 10.6.7
• Xcode 3.2.6
• Homebrew 0.8
• libusb with OpenKinect patch. Homebrew formula
• OpenNI-Binaries v1.1.0.41
• SensorKinect v5.0.1.32
• NITE-MiddleWare Binaries v1.3.1.5
• Cinder HEAD
• And of course: A Kinect (no seriously, it will not run without a kinect plugged into the computer.)

Installing Prerequisites

1. If you haven't already downloaded and installed Xcode 3.2.6, Grab it here. I have not tested this with Xcode 4. You will need to log in.

2. Fire up Terminal.app and install Homebrew and git

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"
brew install git

3. Then install libusb

brew install https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect/raw/unstable/platform/osx/homebrew/libusb-freenect.rb

4. Create a link between /usr/local and /opt/local to fool NITE into thinking we like macports.

ln -s /usr/local /opt/local

5. Install OpenNI using the following steps:

1. Download the package. 

2. extract the package into its own directory.

3. `cd` to that directory in the terminal and run

sudo ./install.sh

6. Repeat Step 5. for NITE and SensorKinect

Seting Up the Build Environment

Now that you have a working install of OpenNI and NITE we need to download and build Cinder.

1. Make a directory on your desktop and call it CinderProjects

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir CinderProjects

2. Clone cinder's git repository

cd ~/Desktop/CinderProjects
git clone git://github.com/cinder/Cinder.git Cinder

3. Download the compatible version of boost(v1.44.0) Extract it, and rename the directory to boost. Copy this directory to ~/Desktop/CinderProjects/Cinder.

4. Build Cinder:

cd ~/Desktop/CinderProjects/Cinder/xcode
./fullbuild.sh

With this step complete you should have a working build environment for this project. All that remains is to clone this repo into ~/Desktop/CinderProjects.

    cd ~/Desktop/CinderProjects
    git clone git://github.com/jimmyharris/ScatterTheWorld

Build Instructions

1. Open the project ScatterTheWorld/xcode/ScatterTheWorld.xcodeproj in Xcode.
2. Make sure the target is set to Release
3. Plug in your kinect.
4. Hit Build & Run

Controls

Gestures:

• Wave to initialte hand tracking. If any existing particles are in the system they are cleared.

While Tracking:

• Push to toggle particle creation on/off.

• Move the hand to spread particles out over the screen.

• Wave to leave the seesion.

Keyboard Controlls:

• 1 Toggle display Visible Light map (grayscale camera).

• 2 Toggle Rendering of Particles.

• g Toggle Gravitational pull towards the center of the window.

• p Toggle Perlin Noise effect on particles.

• s Begin recording frames to a movie to the desktop. The file will be named TestMovie.mov. Pressing s again will stop it.