John and I were invited to help out with the HCI Summer School at ANU to get the students started with the KinectSDK for Windows. In the morning Henry Gardner opened the Summer School quickly followed by a look at some of the Kinect Innovations that have been happening by one of the staff from CSIRO.
We put together what we titled a KinectSDK “Fun Day”. John and I gave a couple of talks to give the students an introduction to the Kinect SDK. The “naked Kinect”, my gesture demo and John’s depth camera demonstrations proved popular with the audience again. Just before lunch we helped break up the group into smaller groups of 3 or 4 so they could share around the 12 kinects in the labs. KinectSDK is great for collaboration between team members as they have to literally get out of their seats to test their ideas so is ideal for working in groups.
The groups of students (including students from high school and universities from interstate) got stuck right into the SDK and fleshing out their ideas for the afternoon.
We took a break around 4pm and went around the room and shared the ideas and vision the students had come up with for the day. There was lots of variety across the 12 groups, using all different parts of the SDK. The Skeleton tracking and Audio proved to be very popular. They had a fun day with the Kinect and many of them will get to spend the afternoons of the rest of the week to continue working on their ideas and of course they can take the code home with them and continue with their ideas. We had lots of fun and look forward to hearing how they went through the week.
Thanks to Henry and Di from ANU for having us!