Silverlight + Kinect = Apps of tomorrow

If you know Silverlight then you need to get a Kinect and build Kinect enhanced Silverlight apps. Having spent the last 2 months doing this I can honestly say it’s changed the way I look at UI’s and UX’s!

Being able to interact with your app using only gestures changes everything, I always knew Kinect was amazing BUT once I started building Silverlight apps with only these gestures as input did I truly realize how life changing NUI was going to be.

I so dearly want to share the experience I’ve had with Kinect in Silverlight/WPF with all of you!

If your willing to listen I will walk you through how to get Kinect gestures into your Silverlight apps. You really need to start experiencing what it’s like to interact with your apps without a keyboard/mouse!

This is our goal:

1. Create a Kinect enabled Silverlight app.

This is a video demonstration of what we’re going to build:

This is what you will need:

1. Silverlight experience – your on your own here
2. Kinect – you will need to purchase this
3. Kinect drivers (uses OpenNI) – this will be provided for you
4. Socket service – we will provide this for you
5. WPF experience – not really required as all the pieces will be provided for you BUT it’s good to know incase you want to extend what Kinect gestures you want to support.

Lets begin ……..

Download all the bits

http://silverlightkinect.codeplex.com/releases

Installing the drivers

1. Make sure your Kinect is disconnected while you install these drivers.
2. You may also need to un-install any existing Kinect drivers you have installed in your PC. The drivers that come with this install are a certain version that the WPF wrapper needs. The source code for the WPF wrapper is included incase your adventurous enough to want to compile it to your own custom drivers.

• Step 1 in the downloaded bits is where all the drivers are installed, make sure you follow the install instructions.
  

  When it requests for the license key use the one provided by Primesense : 0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4=

  After everything is installed you may need to use these config files to setup the kinect cameras : http://cid-1e3f9e1e2f8bc994.office.live.com/embedicon.aspx/Public/KinectConfigFiles.zip

• Running the Socket Service – run it from the VS project, this at least guarantees all your references are intact.
  

• Running the Silverlight demo app (this needs the socket service running from step 3)
  

• Running the WPF Kinect app (this needs the socket service running from step 3)
  

Assuming all goes well you should have a Silverlight app that can listen to Kinect gestures from WPF via a Socket Service.

Over the next few days & weeks I will show you some really cool Kinect-Silverlight experiences. And what makes me the most excited is that we can now truly see the power of Silverlight, and that is it’s ability to quickly innovate & iterate your ideas & designs.

HTML5 will always be 2 steps behind Silverlight and for most people thats ok, BUT for me all I really care about are the apps & experiences of tomorrow. Hello Silverlight,  Kinect & 3D 🙂

Feel free to tweet me any questions if you have problems with the sample : @josefajardo . Or if you have messenger and want to chat through your problems reach me at  fajardo_jf@hotmail.com

update 1 : If you are having problems with an error message that sounds simlar to this “Can’t create any node of the requested type” it’s worth trying these config files. Make sure you place them in the appropriate folders.

http://cid-1e3f9e1e2f8bc994.office.live.com/embedicon.aspx/Public/KinectConfigFiles.zip

====== Important Credits ======

etihwddot :

I need to do a shout out to this guy who did alot of the hard work of getting Kinect drivers compiled to a nice dotnet consumable framework. I used alot of his code 🙂