After a recent Windows 10 update, to version 1803, my Kinect 2 stopped working properly: it would power off every five or seven seconds, power back up, detect users, then power down again. Basically useless for person tracking.
One could see this just from the white lights on the front of the sensor turning on, then off again.
Scouring the Microsoft Kinect Development forums I found the solution, which is, bizarrely, that you have to keep the microphone on the Kinect enabled.
I share this in case anyone else encounters this:
First check if the audio is disabled from Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Sound -> Recording -> Kinect Microphone. It should be enabled.

Next, open the Microsoft Store Camera app - you will have to physically disconnect or disable any other cameras you may have attached to computer, eg webcam - and under Setting -> Change privacy settings -> Microphone -> Allow apps to access your microphone -> enable the microphone. This should resolve it.

You can verify this visually, and also by using the Kinect Configuration Verifier in the Kinect SDK Browser.

HTH

Mark in Brexshit Britain

Hi everyone, and many thanks for all your input, truly appreciated.

I should have mentioned this is a research project, more a case study regarding the bidirectional communication between systems than a performance itself. 

The goal is for us to study and understand the possibilities (and “less possibilities”) to use our systems for expressive movement analysis in performing arts, and the idea of body mapping was just a “small” extra we added to increase our enthusiasm with the experience. 

I agree with what @mark_m mentioned, that if we limit our ambition and keep the project simple we’ll be able of getting something reasonably convincing. 

Also going to watch the tutorial on infrared tracking, thanks for that @mark. 

This topic is getting quite interesting I have to say, please feel free to keep the discussion happening, as new ideas may arise from it. 

Regards to you all from sunny Portugal

John, I started having the same problem, with NI-mate's settings taking 10 minutes to load. I am having email conversations with Delicode, who suggest the problem is related to permissions. I found a solution by creating a new account on the computer and creating a new settings file. I did not try the solution of deleting the settings files, which are located in /Users/youraccount/NI mate

Don

@ianps 

A very advanced approach to this problem, that I believe should work near perfectly (although I am not aware of it ever being developed to this extent).
Is to use Isadora's Javascript actor to utilize the box2dweb physics library (used in Angry birds and more).
This video shows a Proof Of Concept I made some time ago, that is a good starting point to move ahead from.

The idea would be to model the human body using primitives (shapes actor), and group these shapes in code to track as an object via box2dweb.
Once the model is working as required, you can simply turn it off to save cpu cycles (I would put all the drawing into a User Actor), and only utilize the numeric data required for the collision detection.
This is a fairly large job, but should allow for very accurate collision detection of anything that has a XY (even better if it can be described as a primitive, to allow collision detection on it outer edge)

Attached is the Isadora file, and associated JS files, for the DEMO shown in the Proof Of Concept video.
note: the JS code includes links to numerous resource sites, that I used to put this demo together. I suggest looking thru these to find examples of shape grouping.

Box2Dweb.zip

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Isadora and trying to use a Kinect to create some projects where I can interact with other objects in the space. I've followed the Isadora Kinect tutorial using Processing and have gotten the skeleton appear in my projection, but I'm struggling on how to get the skeleton to potentially interact with other objects in the space (such as shapes). 

It doesn't seem as if there are any actors that detect either edges or collisions. I had thought about using a comparator to see when the skeleton and shapes had the same positions (which would indicate a collision at which point I could change the trajectory of the shape) but it seems position is only an input and not an output that can be tied to a conditional. I had also thought about getting the position data of the skeleton from Processing (since the figure turns blue once in frame so the data is there) but I'm not exactly sure how to transfer it over to Isadora. 

Is there a method to create something interactive involving collisions with the Kinect using Isadora and potentially Processing?

Thanks.

@luciedance said:

Therefore would the min and max value be smaller number then I have identified

Hi Lucie

As I understand it, your out min and out max values should be the min and max values that you would like, ie -2 and 2 for the movie player.
Try changing the limit-scale actor to those values and see if that improves things

HTH

Mark (not that one...)

Here a complete description about this camera

https://software.intel.com/sit...

Youu can only mainuplate the image in processing. It’s the processing code that is making the 3D visualisation. All syphon is doing is taking a copy of the output and sending it to isadora which is reciving a copy of image. 

So you can’t rotate the 3D image in XYZ space in isadora; only in processing. 

Heat shield is really effective. If you’ve not used it before though there is one golden rule. There has to be an air gap between the shield and the dark gels/filters you’re protecting, the bigger the better. It can be a few millimetres, say with gel held perfectly tight in frames in separate slots. That will work and you will see an improvement. But if you can increase that gap, ideally by getting the dark colours further from the light source, then you’ll get better results. It’s tricky to do this on profile/lieko type units. On fresnel/pc/flood/parcan type units a good method is to use is to put the heat shield in the normal gel-frame slot and to tape the dark gels to the barn-doors. You have to use much bigger cuts of the colours but they’ll last a lot longer. A lot of tv and film type lighting use this method all the time. Make sure you’ve got heat proof tape though, matt black ‘black-tak’ aluminium tape is perfect but expensive. You can also use cheap plumbers aluminiuminsulation tape, it’s silver so looks ugly but does the job just as well if looks aren’t a concern.

A final trick is to consider how the lights are focused. With fresnel/pc type units you adjust the spot/flood by physically moving the lamp closer to the lens. A fully flooded unit will have the lamp as close to the lens as possible meaning the heat is much much more direct as there’s less of an air gap between the heat source (the lamp) and the gel/filters. Refocusing slightly, moving the lamp back from the lens just a small amount, can have a big impact on gel/filter life time. You won’t be able to light such a wide area of course, but 4x not-quite-full-flood fresnels would be a better option than 3x full-flood fresnels covering the same sized area.

It’s a bit trickier with profile/zoom units as you’re moving the lens rather than the lamp, but the basic principle is try to focus with the lens further from the gel. Here the trick is more that a wider focus helps dissipate the heat over a larger area of the gel.