Young indie developer Kinects your life

A four-wheeled robot revs up and travels across the room as twenty two-year-old Samarth Shah verbally commands it to move forward. The robot is connected to a computer and the Microsoft Kinect, an accessory of the XBox 360 video game console. Shah belongs to a sprawling breed of young indie developers who put to use the Kinect’s abilities to recognise speech, gestures, and motion in applications beyond the Kinect’s intended purpose of gaming.The robot, which Shah built along with two friends Devanshee Shah and Yagnik Suchak, recognises voice commands and gestures </a>and performs simple actions. Raise the right hand and it goes forward. A swipe of the hand sends it to the right. It stops when the left hand is raised and moves to the left when the left hand is swiped. The gesture recognition programme, coded in Visual Basic using the Microsoft software development kit (SDK), carries out what Shah describes as “skeleton tracking”. It follows the positions of 20 joints of the body to detect a valid gesture. The three cameras on the Kinect together determine the angle, position, and orientation of the joints. The trio has decided to scale up the design of the robot to numerous applications such as operating a wheelchair with voice commands. Shah is also working on a Kinect application to surf the web using a browser that recognises movement.

Click here for full story