Question

How difficult would it be to link an xbox's kinect's person tracking ability with an arduino?

Answer 1

An Xbox 360 or Xbox one have many orders of magnitude more processing power and memory than an Arduino. Arduinos have very low powered processors and low memory. Since the Kinect only provides sensory information to the console and the console does all the hard work (analyzing the data), there is absolutely no way you can replicate that work on an Arduino.

Answer 2

I'm afraid you are probably out of luck.

Answer 3

In terms of hardware most of the Arduinos have far to low hw-specs to run cv-applications (although I think I remember seeing quite a powerfull one recently). I't would probably be better to go for something a little bit more powerfull like an rspb pie or simillar. I'm not 100% sure how much of the actual work the hardware in the kinekt is doing but I suspect It's a rather small part.

There are some public drivers and libraries if you want to try out on a computer.
The OpenKinekt community for example:
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page

I've seen other cv-platforms like Kinekt runing on pie-like hardware so it shouldent be impossible.
https://duo3d.com/

This might also be interesting
http://opencv.org/

Answer 4

Kinect*

Answer 5

A Raspberry Pi sounds much more reasonable. It has a relatively recent ARM6 processor which you can overclock up to nearly 1GHz and has 512MB of RAM. In comparison to Arduinos this is much more power.

Answer 6

It also has an on chip GPU.

Answer 7

Exactly! (and man, I have to practice my spelling - pi not pie :P )

Answer 8

I love them so much I have two! They really are nice devices.

Answer 9

Thanks for all the information! I'll surely find a way when I become more adept with the technology. I'll start with arduino before branching out -- just because the arduino starter kit has been given great reviews for people getting acquainted with electrical engineering stuff.

Though wouldn't it be possible for the arduino to act as a conduit between the kinect, and some hardware that could 'handle' the large amount of processing information given from the kinect?

Answer 10

Yes that is certainly a possibility. Also, after a bit of googling, I think people have managed to barely get some type of tracking system setup via Kinect and the Arduino. However, I'm almost sure that it will go much more smoothly with beefier hardware.

Answer 11

I see- thanks. I'm sure that the better the hardware, the more seamless & lag free it is.

A couple of cool videos here too: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=arduino+kinect