Very successful book about a fascinating sensor

Very successful book about a fascinating sensor

Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot (Make: Books) (Paperback)

Customer Review

The resemblance to the book Making Things Talk from the same series is available but not as big as you thought at first glance.
Here at Making Things See the Physical Computing occupies a much smaller space.
This book deals mainly with the 3D stereoscopic camera Kinect and how drivers / libraries OpenNI read and process their recordings with the open source software Processing incl. The (free).

The Kinect is an accessory to the games console Xbox from Microsoft and can be purchased separately for about 140. That alone is already a sensation, because so far 3D cameras were with similar specs more than 10 times more expensive.
This book uses the Processing Library SimpleOpenNI, which is in contrast to the library OpenKinect not limited to Apple PCs. Thus, here both a programming environment (Processing) and driver (OpenNI) is used that work on all common platforms Windows, Linux and PC Appel.

In the book is very well described what software (freeware) is needed and how to install them so that you can already look at 3D images on the screen in a short time. The Kinect camera itself is sufficiently well explained in the book, so you can understand their advantages and disadvantages quickly.
That it is far from done with the acquisition and display of 3D images, the book shows that, by this subject only occupies the first third.

Almost as important is the processing of the images on your computer to extract the information from the images. In concrete terms this means, for example: the position is when you record a person determine their right hand in order to be able to click a button in the Processing program (like a gaming console similar). The OpenNI drivers include the recognition of the reference libraries, which are then addressed from processing out with just a few lines of code.

Ultimately, you can by this book Programming An animated logo in the end, which is controlled by body movements so actually a simple game similar to Kinectspielen on an Xbox.
Revolutionary here is that you do not need for practical computer science-knowledge. The book not only describes step by step what the individual lines of code mean but also explains the theoretical background, such as how to create 3D surfaces from point clouds.

I am thrilled the essential themes are presented around the core topic 3D imaging as well and easy to understand here.
In addition, the book has a lot of new information even for experts in the field of optical metrology.

Another theme of the book is the creation of 3D models based on recorded images and then can be printed on a 3D printer. The section on the 3D printer is one but not necessarily one of the highlights of this book ...

In the last quarter, the author then deals with the physical computing, ie as the result of the image processing via an Arduino microcontroller for example in a movement of a robot arm (do-it-yourself model of two servos built) will be implemented. Specifically, that means for example: One imagines the Kinect and controlled by movement of the head, the position of the robot arm, and this distinguishes this movement track with a pen on a paper by.
Here, too, the author gives the necessary background knowledge (eg robot kinematics). For the function of the software and hardware but this understanding is not a requirement. That means you can use this book as well so that you typing out the sample programs / downloads and then use as a starting version for your own project.

Overall, this book is very well done and is of very high quality content as didactic. It is also very well suited as an introduction to this topic, if you then want to delve deeper eg Matlab or C programming (which you must also, if you want to create really powerful programs). Even this, the author at the end of a few valuable tips.

We use this book at Reutlingen University in mechatronics, inter alia, for student projects.

Samsung DVD-D530 / EN Rank: 5/5
July 10
Very good article 20 Rank: 5/5
July 14
Incredible book ... Best of LH Rank: 5/5
November 7
Works perfectly! 4 3 Rank: 5/5
October 8
Very good book 297 Rank: 4/5
September 14
Perfect 1 11734 Rank: 5/5
March 5

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