Research on the Xbox 360 Kinect

Microsoft experts have said that the Kinect had its issues for example “The problem was skeletal tracking,” experts explains. “Kinect has to recognize body parts. Humans do this recognition easily, but our brains have been trained since birth to recognize humans of various shapes in different positions. For Kinect, rather than describe to the computer how to recognize a human, we had the system ‘learn’ what human movements look like by feeding it a large set of examples.” Kinect’s machine learning needed to scale up to learn a million sample images within a few hours. Each successive training session enabled the system to recognize variations in body size, clothing, hair, and body positions with greater accuracy this enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.Among the applications for Kinect is Video Kinect, which enables voice chat or video chat with other Xbox 360 users or users of Windows Live Messenger.The application can use Kinect's tracking functionality and the Kinect sensor's motorized pivot to keep users in frame even as they move around.

Kinect System

Today we played with the Kinect on the xbox 360, we learned how you can control the games, using motion controls, (dance central, Kinect adventures, and Zumba) all the games were fun and more interactive than just sat playing with a 'normal' control. We did this in the Studio as you need space to play which we had to make sure safety guidelines are adapted. We had to move and make kinetic energy, in response to the device the movement was picked up and moved the character, this could be useful in places such as, education, science, music, sport, medical and manufacturing sectors. By using this equipment we used it for research possibilities. The Kinect also takes shots of movement and is triggered by movement, these could be used in a timeline and edited into an animation of us, the students, using the software.

Also while we was dancing around testing out the software we recored our self’s with a filpcam on a tripod. We will edit this in the next sesions via Final Cut Software. 

What is Stop Frame Animation?

It is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in very slightly between every frame, creating motion when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-motion.

Wallace and Gromit maker Nick Park

StopFrameAnimation

Today we created our own production of StopFrameAnimation, our inital ideas was to have Mary Popins floating with a suitcase and it gets really windy and her belongings fall out of the suitcase. It took us 46 pictures to capture the whole production, Next week we will be putting it all together. The equipment we used
1. Canon 5D
2. Cambo camera stand
3. Soft box wafers / striplight wafer
4. Sync lead
5. Bowens Pulsar Radio triggers
6. Bowens 500w lighting
7. Canon 24-105mm zoom lens

 

I Do. Stop motion film by Manasi Kashyap.

xBox - Stop Motion Commercial

The Best Stop Motion made ever!!!