Tomorrow the interactive marketing agency BLITZ will release source code and scripts for using Kinect with Adobe Flash by way of Node.js. The company has also released a short video tutorial, embedded below, explaining how to get Kinect and Flash working together. BLITZ’s solution should also work with Silverlight and Unity. The source code will be available from BLITZ’s blog at 8:00 AM Pacific on January 12.
Flash Kinect Demo from BLITZ Agency on Vimeo.
In November open souce drivers for Kinect were released by Hector Marcan. This release inspired BLITZ Director of Technology Noah Gedrich and Software Developer Yosef Flomin to start tinkering with Kinect. According to the copy BLITZ included with the video:
Having worked with multiple UI technologies over the years, Gedrich and Flomin realized that if they could get Kinect to publish information that any UI platform could support, a slew of developers could use this same code to create breakthrough motion-based experiences using familiar markup languages.
The trick? A simple socket server. Using a C++ application to send all the skeleton data to a socket server, they were able to connect other technology to the socket, enabling use of the data.
This is an exciting development in Kinect hacking and should open up the device to more developers.