I bought an Xbox Kinect late last month as I wanted to use it to scan in my daughter to get printed out at Shapeways or a similar service for a present for my Gran’s birthday.

I had seen software like ReconstructMe and others like Skanect on YouTube which have the ability to scan using a Kinect.

I then found myself wanting to experiment with the live data coming in from the Kinect. And I didn’t really know where to start.

Since I’ve been playing around with Arduino I thought I’d see if Processing had a way to interface with it. The Arduino programming environment editor is a derivative of the Processing editor. So I thought there would be some familiarity there.

I then Googled processing with kinect and came across this post by Daniel Shiffman which provided a library to interface Kinect with Processing.

Kinect Point Cloud demo in Processing from shiffman on Vimeo.

I then opened up the point cloud example (shown above) and proceeded to hack for the evening, tweaking, reverse engineering Daniel’s source code and learning keyboard inputs with Processing and after a little while I came up with this matrixy style hologram of myself with keyboard controlled rotation. (There’s no audio.)

If this has peeked your curiosity in to Processing check out the Hello World! Processing documentary below:

Hello World! Processing from Ultra_Lab on Vimeo.