Archive for the ‘WebGL’ Category
A depthcam? A webkinect? Introducing a new kind of webcam
Update, 10 February: Sorry for some serious reliability issues over the last few days. The streaming server is now hosted in-house at CASA, which should be a lot more robust.
At CASA we’ve been looking at using a Kinect or three in our forthcoming ANALOGIES (Analogues of Cities) conference + exhibition.
We’ve been inspired in part by Ruairi Glynn‘s amazing work here at UCL, and Martin has been happily experimenting with the OpenKinect bindings for Processing.
Meanwhile, I recently got to grips with the excellent Three.js, which makes WebGL — aka 3D graphics in modern browsers — as easy as falling off a log. I’m also a big fan of making things accessible over the web. And so I began to investigate prospects for working with Kinect data in HTML5.
There’s DepthJS, an extension for Chrome and Safari, but this requires a locally-connected Kinect and isn’t very clear on Windows support. There’s also Intrael, which serves the depth data as JPEG files and provides some simple scene recognition output as JSON. But it’s closed-source and not terribly flexible.
The depthcam
So I decided to roll my own. I give you: the depthcam!