Thought I might get the blog back on track by sharing with you one of my latest assignments. We were asked to create small teams of around 5 and create a small project that would allow us to experience programming as a team. This meant organising ourselves into roles, planning out coding conventions and practices, managing time and using version control (Redmine) to keep ourselves on target.

We were inspired by the recent V-Motion project and wanted to create something along the same lines. We decided to create something a little more user-friendly by making it more of a game then a music tool, something along the lines of Guitar Hero.

My role for the project was to manage all the Kinect side of things. I used OpenCV to manipulate the Kinect, a library that proved both intuitive and powerful. The class I created would output a list of points that was used by the rest of the program, mainly as collision points to test if the buttons where being activated, and as target points of the particles to seek. I was also responsible for creating the player avatar that depicts the player on screen as well as creating the greyscale video stream you see in the startscreen.

The music side of thing was handled by Billy Copley, who created a system that would tell the program to create a button on beats, as well as manipulating the music to create “error” sounds by screwing around the pitch, very cool!

The particles were handled by George Hardcastle, who used clever framebuffer layering to create the trailing effect, as well as allowing multiple different elements to be drawn together (ie background, particles, player avatar etc).

I’m hoping to come back to the project at a later date and add more functionality to the game, like menu systems etc. I would also like to try and make the game like a little more visually interesting by adding items like sound visualisers, background items etc.