Kinect for Windows clicks at Eyeo
We recently attended the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and what an eye-opening experience it was. For those who aren’t familiar with Eyeo, it’s a creative coding conference that brings together coders, data lovers, artists, designers and game developers. It features one-of-a-kind workshops, theater style sessions and interaction with open-source activists and pioneers.
This year marked the fifth anniversary of the Eyeo Festival, and the Kinect for Windows team was pleased to be among the workshop presenters. Our workshop, “Incorporating Kinect v2 into Creative Coding Experiences,” drew 35 participants—none of whom had worked with the latest Kinect sensor. In fact, only four of them had worked with the original Kinect sensor, so the workshop offered a great opportunity to acquaint these developers with the creative potential of Kinect.
The event provided resources, links and training, preparing the participants to incorporate Kinect into their future endeavors. As part of their workshop fee, each received a Kinect for Xbox One sensor, a Kinect Adapter for Windows and a Windows To Go drive. As the workshop progressed, the participants got deeply engaged in the Kinect technology—experimenting, asking questions and writing playful scripts.
Participants in the Kinect v2 workshop got down to some serious creative coding.
Even more Eyeo attendees learned about Kinect for Windows and related technologies from James George, Jesse Kriss and Béatrice Lartigue, three of the festival’s featured speakers. George, one of the most influential artist in the coding community, spoke about the photography of the future and how he has used the Kinect sensor’s depth and color cameras to create images that can be explored in three dimensions. Kriss, who designs and builds tools for artists and scientists, discussed his work on introducing Microsoft HoloLens to the scientists at in the Human Interfaces Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Lartigue, a new media artist and designer, talked about Les métamorphoses de Mr. Kali, her Kinect installation at London’s Barbican Centre, describing how she used Kinect for Windows to reduce the space between us and our environment in her interactive works. These compelling speakers left the audience eager to experiment with Kinect for Windows—and anxious for the release of Microsoft HoloLens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L07v4rNvKKI
Eyeo provided a great opportunity to reach the creative coding community, showing them how Kinect for Windows can be a potent tool in their work.
The Kinect for Windows Team
Key links