kinect and macOs

I understand its difficult to implement skeleton kinect V2 in MacOs (but Millumin can do it, I don’t know how…) and its possible to send information by OSC. But it would be great to have at minimum the rawDepth array value (available in MacOs Processing), it want to use that info with the incredible Touch Designer 3D possibilities!
Thank for your work porting TD to Mac.
Jacques Hoepffner

Hello,
I come back to that post concerning kinect on mac.
Ni-Mate just released a now version able to deliver skeleton info on mac(V1 & V2). processing is able to give all images (color, depth IR) by Syphon and you can obtain the raw depth data.
I think it’s very important to introduce it in MacOs version of TD! I am not sufficiently skilled in C++ to work on a plug-in…
Thank you in advance.
Jacques

I wish it was possible also…

So why not use NI-Mate or Processing and send that info to TD over OSC or Syphon?

The kinect is not supported by Microsoft on Mac, so I doubt Derivative will implement a selfmade hacky solution and officially support that to their clients…

I use it and, when it’s possible, send it via OSC. But it’s too heavy for OSC to send depth raw data (50 times / second * 51 x424 * 4000 steps…).
I think it’s possible to do it (Processing, Millumin and Ni-Mate do it) and it’s a great argument for potential Mac users.

You need to send the depth texture via Syphon, and receive it in TouchDesigner with a Syphon Spout In TOP.
Skeleton tracking is much less data and can come over OSC.

I tried that but depth texture is less defined than depth raw data, and for my project, I need the most detailed depth data possible.
jacques

Not sure what you mean with raw depth data.
If your Syphon texture is 32 bit you should have enough precision to get the whole kinect pointcloud in TD.

Hi, I’m new to TC (just noticed 099 will run on my Mac) and interested to have Kinect v2 support. :wink: Those are my thoughts so far.

NiMate is using [url]https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect[/url] and [url]https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2[/url] libraries to successfully deliver Kinect v1 and v2 support to macOS. It would be great to have it in macOS TC, but I don’t know if Derivative is interested into integrating any unofficial drivers into TC.

For now, this is what it’s possible to receive from NiMate via Syphon:

[url]http://i.imgur.com/3jeYDZo.jpg[/url]

On the left is image encoded with one channel, which is trivial to receive in TC, but pretty bad in terms of details.

On the right side is image encoded with ROS118 protocol, it uses RG color channels for depth and B for marking human characters. This one contains the complete data, but it needs to be decoded - it’s fairy simple to do in Python, but I’m not sure how performant will it be.

Thanks n23,

I think you mean TD? :smiley:

Anyways, we are evaluating methods for getting Kinect into macOS but as you mention there is no official support from Microsoft for it. It is on our radar but slightly lower priority right now with all the many things we are working on in 099 at the moment. Thank you for sharing your information and investigations, they will work into our discussions when we revisit the matter.

I’ve also found that it’s often easier to setup Kinect v2 on a Mac than on a Windows machine, because Kinect v2 is picky about USB 3.0 controllers.

Thanks for the reply @ben. :slight_smile: Right, TD!