Hand Tracking with MS Research and Kinect at Future Decoded 2015

Hand Tracking with MS Research and Kinect at Future Decoded 2015


A bit of a departure from RoomBuilder, which I haven't blogged about for a long time, but which is going VR... stay tuned.

This post is about graphics and relates to something that's pretty cool - hand tracking using a Kinect sensor. I was lucky enough to attend Future Decoded last week. There was some great keynotes on the technical day. However, there was a bit of a surprise during the keynote from Chris Bishop at Microsoft Research. His main focus was on AI, machine learning and making use of deep learning to solve difficult problems. One of the applications that cropped up during the keynote was hand pose tracking using Kinect and an Xbox sensor. Now, this has come up before with Handpose. However, it was still a bit of a surprise to see a live demo - which I manage to capture a few seconds of once I realised what was happening. Whether there's been much progress since the original Handpose reveal is hard to tell, but it's clear that solving the hand tracking issue has real benefits for AR and for Microsoft - with hardware such as HoloLens and also for VR, a real interest of mine. Your hands are the ultimate natural user interface for many tasks - assuming issues such as occlusion and latency can be solved.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holographic Capture using Multiple Kinect - A DIY Approach with Lessons Learned!

Image
Lessons Learned Creating a DIY Holographic Capture Rig using Multiple Kinect Sensors I’ve always had a strong interest in technology and photography and consider myself to be an early adopter. I also have a passion for graphics, virtual reality and have a background in software architecture and development. Several years ago, I acquired a Kinect for Windows device, but because of USB issues on my main PC, I didn’t get around to playing with the hardware for a long time. Kinect can be notoriously fussy about which USB 3 controllers it will work with, this is a well-documented issue .   Eventually, I managed to get a USB expansion card that played nicely with the Kinect and I fired up the SDK examples to see what it could do. I was impressed, even if there was a lot of depth noise, particularly at the edge of objects - so called flying pixels. I’m not sure when it happened, whether it was prompted by getting an Oculus VR kickstarter headset (DK1) or by the birth of my daughter, b
Read more

Welcome to my World

Hi and welcome to my world! This is my new blog, where I intend to chat about graphics. More specifically, the challenges of creating a new graphics product that can be used to automatically generate 3D models of rooms - the output of which is aimed at the graphics professional. I already have some experience at this, having written a tool I use myself to generate 3D models that look great - but it's now time for some improvements and to make it more useable. Join me for the ride, if you're interested. In this blog, I'll post some thoughts about graphics, software and usability and hopefully a few tasters and screenshots of what 'RoomBuilder2' can do. Perhaps I need a more catchy name, but so many are already taken ... Ok let's call it Xyecco. Thanks, Max
Read more

Straight Skeleton Madness (a plea for help)

Image
After completing my work on boolean path operations, I have moved on to looking at algorithms for offsetting polygons. One of the ones that stands out is known as the 'straight skeleton' algorithm. This computes a set of connected paths which describe the position of verticies as the polygon offset size is altered. Unfortunately, it's only directly applicable to straight line paths (with mitre joins), but that's good enough for now. The algorithm is straightforward for convex polygons, but gets a little bit more complex when dealing with concave points, since this can lead to the creation of sub paths. In theory, while the straight skeleton is not directly applicable to offsetting, it produces a structure which can be used to calculate an offset path. As an aside, the straight skeleton of a polygon is ideal for determining its 'roof structure' - which will be of use elsewhere in my software. Progress on my .NET straight skeleton code has been slow but fairly dec
Read more