Kinect on Windows 7

I bought an Xbox 360 with Kinect recently, my first ever gaming console.

Prior to this the only computer game I've ever had any interest in has been Flight Simulator, but it wasn't just the Kinect games that drew me to the Xbox, it was the Kinect itself. For those of you that don't know, there are a gazzillion links out there that tells you what the Kinect is, but basically it's a motion sensor camera that detects and uses your movements to control the Xbox and the games. Having used it for a few weeks, I can attest that even to a non-gamer like me, it is truly awesome, and hints very favourably as to where the direction that user-interaction might be heading.

But now, I want to be able to use the Kinect to control my PC, and I'm going to use this blog to document some of my experiences with this. I'll start by saying that as far as I'm aware, at the time of writing, this is totally unsupported by Microsoft. They are working on an SDK for Kinect, but I don't think that's available yet.

So to start, I'm going to use some free software called Kinemote to try and get it to work. The Kinemote software promises "Minority Report" like gestures, which sounds cool to me. After downloading 4 pre-requisite bits of software from the Kinemote site, I then register (which is actually pretty tricky as the Captcha phrase box is probably the worst I have ever seen, and is pretty much unreadable), and once I've completed the registration and signed in, I then download the Kinemote Software, and something called the PCD Engine Dev release, which I'm not sure I need, but I download it anyway.

Software Installation
No issues with installation of the 4 bits of required software on my Windows 7 x86 machine (untested on x64).  I didn't do anything with the 'Motor Driver' as I figure this will come when I actually plug the Kinect in. The Kinemote software is also a standard install. When it comes to the 'Palm Click and Drag' (PCD) install, there is a directory with some raw files, and I don't know where to put those, so I leave that for now.

Hardware Installation
Trying to connect up my Kinect to the PC's USB port, I realise the plug from the Kinect is not a standard USB connector, but reading around a bit more, I see that you have to use power adapter that's supplied with the Kinect, which as well as connecting to an electrical socket, you also connect to the Kinect plug, which then gives you a standard USB plug to connect to your PC. Once conencted, Windows finds drivers for all but the "XBox NUI Audio", which I guess I'm not too concerned about anyway.

Configuring Kinemote
I then opened the Kinemote software, modified the option so that to start a session I simply waved at the camera, and tried to start by giving a wave at the Kinect. Unfortunately, I got an error message "Kinect Motor Driver not found, Led and Motor control disabled". The Kinemote FAQ helped me out here. Having sorted that out, I try again, expecting to be able to control the mouse pointer with my hand, but it still doesn't work.

At this point I give up with Kinemote. There's no way I'm ever going to get this to work on multiple teachers' laptops with this amount of setup and fiddling around. Time to look into something simpler, and Win-and-I looks like the next candidate.....