Kinect in Motion - Audio and Visual Tracking by Example Paperback – April 25, 2013

Giorio and Fascinari have done an excellent work on this book. A very helpful aid to get involved in the fascinating world of Kinect for Windows and motion control computing and the techniques for designing natural user interfaces (NUIs).Chapter 1, Kinect for Windows - Hardware and SDK Overview: An easy, yet thorough explanation of the Kinect sensor hardware architecture and its sensors. The reader of this chapter will finally understand the secrets behind the Kinect sensor and will understand how it tracks its users and their movements.Chapter 2, Starting with Image Streams: This chapter guides the reader through the implementation of code to capture data from the color stream, depth stream, and IR stream data. At the same time, the reader of this chapter becomes familiar with the different mechanisms to handle images.Chapter 3, Skeletal Tracking: Perhaps the most fun part of this book. The programmer will learn how to track motion and get control of the Kinect for Windows users' movement, by means of manipulating and controlling the skeletons in both the default mode and he seated mode (available in Kinect for Windows but not in Kinect for XBOX360).Chapter 4, Speech Recognition: This chapter helps the reader to understand how to manipulate the Kinect sensor audio stream data, how to work with grammars defined by XML files and programmatically and how to track audio coming from different directions.Definitely a must read for everyone interested in programming applications for Kinect for Windows. The only drawback is that this book focuses on version 1.6 of the Kinect for Windows SDK, and at the time of its publication, Microsoft has made available already version 1.7. Programmers should definitely refer to the newest SDK documentation in addition to reading this book in order to benefit from the new tools and features.

This book was very easy to read and follow. It provides a nice overview of the Microsoft Kinect system and how it works, with chapters dedicated to skeletal tracking and voice recognition.A nice strength to this book is that it contains a fair bit of sample code.

I really love technical books that get to the point!I can't stand most of the tomes that spend 100+ pages explaining the history of computer science or other nonsense. Kinect in Motion is NOT one of those books. It gets to the point of teaching you about audio and visual tracking and gives you some great development workflow tips along the way. When the authors do cover background information, it's directly related to learning the task at hand. Very cool!I was personally interested in this book because I've been wanting to understand Kinect's audio tracking abilities. While there are samples and blog posts out there floating around, I just never really got the whole picture of how things work. I've always wanted to build an intelligent video conferencing system that tracks users as they speak, and now I have what I need to make it happen.The book really is good at explaining motion tracking and especially the nuances around folks that are standing and sitting. For my goal of creating an intelligent video conferencing system. Most people are sitting, so this was very helpful.Overall, the style of this book is clean, focused, and sometimes you get little bits of humor which I appreciate. If you want to learn and more importantly UNDERSTAND Kinect audio and visual tracking, I highly recommend this book!Cheers!

Although I'm not a developer pur sang, this book gave me great insight in how Kinect works and how you can use it to develop applications that use the video and audio tracking. Chapter 1 describes how Kinect works and what the current state of tracking enables. The next chapters give you enough clues to develop your own applications, and the notes and summary in each chapter makes reading and understanding easy. And finally in the appendix you will learn how to save time coding and testing on Kinect enabled applications by recording all the video data coming into an application from a Kinect sensor with Kinect Studio, injecting the recorded video in an application allowing us to test your code without getting out of your chair over and over again. All in all this book is worth reading!

This is a short and very easy to read book, but is very useful. Clemente Giorio and Massimo Fascinari have taken a very look leading approach to drawing you in to how to use the Kinect SDK and get used to NUI style development.After a fast introduction of hardware (chapter 1), book builds up very nicely on all the features enabled with Kinect like Cameras (chapter 2), Skeletons (chapter 3), Speech recognition (chapter 4) and useful tools (chapter 5).There are a lot of examples that help to understand all features and gradually go deeper into the understanding of the development with Kinect. This book is useful also for expert developer because introduces interesting tricks.Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in delving into Kinect.

This book has a very straight-forward approach to kinect programming.By keeping it simple and concise you can easily understand and get into kinect!It's even got an hardware overview, which I found great in order to further understand.Even though it is a small book, you'll be amazed on how quickly you'll start programming with Kinect just by following the examples.If you have any programming basis and want to get started with Kinect, this book is a great tool.