“Beginners Guide to the Kinect API”, a session aimed at scratching the surface of the Microsoft Kinect API, got its first outing last night at Dev South Coast, a monthly developers meetup in Southampton (previously known as NxtGen Southampton).

The session went through the various streams of data available from the Kinect – such as audio, camera, infrared, depth, skeletal face mapping and skeletal structure mapping. Each stream had a demo and a dive into the code used. Unfortunately the audio demo decided it didn’t want to listen, however we were able to move on and take a look at the camera feeds which thankfully did work correctly.

One nugget of information I wanted to get over to the attendees was that the Kinect API makes it easy to grab the post-processed data from the Kinect. The streams are really easy to pick up and the API delivers the data through events which you can easily handle. Streams such as the ColorStream() deliver camera images, add in the event of .ColorFrameReady and it’s so easy to pick up the camera frame through the event arguments (e.ColorFrame) – I don’t think it could be easier!

I’ve put the session forward for DDD North and hopefully it will be picked by the attendees as it was a session I really enjoyed. Giving a talk at an event such as DDD North is a little less nerve-wracking that last nights’ talk as at a DDD event the attendees have the ability to move into a different session if they don’t connect with the topic or the spreaker. At a Dev South Coast event there is no other session, it’s like having a captive audience. Last nights session was also the first one where I’ve broken into doing live code demos – thank goodness for Coderush and templates!

Hopefully the session was enjoyable – just waiting for the Dev South Coast feedback.