My current project is all about recording animation skeletons using the XBOX 360 Kinect and then displaying those animations in
full 3D using WebGL. The basics are already functional and on display here: Animate
The first challenge is learning that you can even this. Apparently as of HTML 5, hardware accelerated 3D graphics are supported via Web GL.
By default this is not supported in Internet Explorer. However with the help of the IEWebGL, IE can support
the graphics. Also, it is useful to use a scripting tool like Three.js to make the development easier.
So far my accomplishments are very limited, but learning has been fun.
Once I was able to get very simple shapes to draw in WebGL, my concern was that I wanted to be able to animate something. It really doesn't matter
what you animate, the problem is that positioning the elements one frame at a time is a tremendous pain. However, as it turns out I already had
an XBox 360 Kinect. This goes a long way to simplifying the problem. With a special adapter, I was
able to connect the kinect sensor to my laptop. Older models use a USB, but I had the newer model that transfers more power through the USB cable.
To work with the XBox kinect, you need a specific version of the Kinect
for Widnows SDK from Microsoft. I think there are other versions that will only work with a kinect that was built for windows, and won't work
with the XBox 360 Kinect. But even with the SDK, this doesn't automatically let you record and save your skeletons to a format that WebGL can use.
So the next step was to build a C# application that uses the kinect SDK: Kinect Skeleton Recorder
Once you use this application to record your animation, you can save it as XML. The XML can then be parsed by a website like: Animate
