Christmas comes early this year for us here at Delicode as we get to announce the release of NI mate v1.12! This release fixes some major bugs (namely the model 1473 issue), brings support for Kinect for Windows devices (through our new OpenNI v2 compliant build for Windows available on the freshly rebooted OpenNI Arena, read more below) and – probably most interestingly for our existing user community – introduces integrated support for the very cool and fun to use processing programming language.

So why processing? We’ve always hoped to make NI mate for the designer, the animator, the game developer, the musician, the VJ, the dancer, the interactive or visual artist, the student and so on. It’s a tool for people bursting with creative ideas for devices like the Kinect, but who feel intimidated by the thought of immediately diving deep in to code. In thinking of ways how we could make programming fun for sensor devices like the Kinect, we came about the idea of integrating processing in to NI mate.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Initially developed to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing also has evolved into a tool for generating finished professional work. Today, there are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning, prototyping, and production. -Processing.org

Having now done this, it is our sincere hope that we get many of you to try out how simple it can be to code cool stuff for the Kinect (or which ever supported device you have)! In order to encourage this development and – especially – sharing of all kinds of cool ideas, we are already planning to hold some fun competitions during the winter and coming spring. Stay tuned for more information on those! :)

New features and bug fixes in v1.12:

• Support for model 1473 of the Kinect for XBOX (no more zero ID issues upon registering)

• OpenNI v2 based Kinect for Windows / Asus Xtion / PrimeSense Carmine (coming) version for Windows downloadable from the OpenNI arena. In order to use a Kinect for Windows (model 1517) sensor please install the Kinect for Windows Runtime (before installing, please read the Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows SDK licensing policy)

• Integrated Processing (Processing 2.0 beta 7 upwards tested and recommended!) editor with automatic skeleton, OSC controller and live feed support. Be sure to check out the cool examples further down this post!

• Skeleton tracking is no longer stopped momentarily on profile changes

• Skeleton parts with low confidence (these are not sent from NI mate) are drawn red in the live view tab

• The profile saving & loading logic was changed to a cleaner logic: at startup NI mate loads a profile called “Default” and all changes are saved to that until another profile is loaded. When an other profile is loaded all changes will effect that profile only

• The pause button now also slows down the sensor update frequency to lower the demand for cpu power

• Bug fix: the skeleton is now drawn in correct aspect ratio in the live view tab if the window is stretched

More on the processing support:

• The new Processing tab holds a fully featured Processing code editor with autocompletion, syntax highlighting and tabbed editing

• All of the data that NI mate can output through OSC and the live view modes is directly available for the processing codes as automatically generated variables

• NI mate makes it super easy to import your existing Processing sketches to NI mate via the “Processing -> Import Sketch” option, so now you can add Kinect / Xtion interactions to any of your previous sketches instantly

• You can also export the processing sketch directly from NI mate to a self-contained executable for all platforms that NI mate supports to enable quick deployment to other computers. (The export functionality is only available for full NI mate licence owners)

• Read the full details of the Processing integration from the NI mate documentation (to be fully updated on 19.12.2012)

• When ever you feel like it, here are a couple of nice example profiles for you to get started:

  1. A super simple example demonstrating the skeleton and live view data: NI_mate_processing_simple.config.

     Simply right-click on the above link and select “Save as…” to save the profile file to your computer. Import the profile to NI mate with “Profile -> Import…” and click “Run” in the Processing tab.

  2. If you want to get more serious, you could try this super cool Processing tutorial for the Kinect we found on CreativeApplications.net. In fact we went as far as converting the sketches (after receiving permission from their author Amnon Owed) in to using NI mate’s Processing support – in a process that took five minutes from an experienced coder. After checking out the what the final results will look like from the video found below, feel free to download the profiles here and try them yourself: NI_mate_processing_lines.config and NI_mate_processing_geometry.config

     Please note that in order to run these examples you will need to install the following three libraries to your Processing sketchbook/libraries -folder: v3ga blob detection library, Toxiclibs 020 and PBox2D: A simple JBox2D wrapper library

 


A video demonstration of Amnon Owed’s Kinect Physics Tutorial for Processing

Now go get NI mate v1.12 from the download page!