For reasons that will become apparent in a few weeks time I needed to see if I could get my Mac to talk to the Kinect using the brilliant open source OpenKinect.org. I don’t do too much in the command shell on my Mac so the realms of Homebrew and MacPorts mentioned in the instructions, whilst I knew what the point of them is, meant that my machine was in a bit of a state.
I had used something call Fink a while back, but could not remember why so I tried the Homebrew instructions but failed and had too many paths and bits not very happy to take what is a ready made package. So instead I went to the MacPorts compile it yourself path.
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started.
The glview application then ran nicely and told me I had 0 kinects attached to my Mac 🙂
A prerequisite for this is to have the kinect with a power supply as opposed to bundled newer xbox and kinects where the power is built in. I simply took the Mac to the xbox, unplugged the USB from there and popped it into the Mac, ran glview again as a test. Bingo!
At its very basic mode you can see the colouring for depth being rendered as the predlets are nearer or further from the device.
Next step is to hook into the libraries and make sense of the data 🙂
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