Wouldn't it be better if he was only holding a small 6" long stick, the kinect tracks that, and digitally adds the extended lightsaber? Maybe this was just his step 1.
It would minimize the destruction caused in your home from swinging around a 4' stick.
That was my thought a week ago. The kinect is limited in that it can only see the front of your body. Some movements obscure your body and it basically just freaks out.
The full length stick works better for duels. Filming cool duels is pretty much what this thing screams to be used for. Of course to minimize damage, you could probably use something lighter than a solid wooden stick.
In graphics terms when someone says 'realtime' they usually are referring to the performance of the algorithm, not whether or not there's a delay. Lots of video games have input delays of 100ms or more.
The framerate is pretty bad, though. I wonder why - I was under the impression the Kinect captures at 30fps.
It looks like he had a CPU monitor on his panel, which also looked pegged. Could just be he needs to spend sometime optimizing cause the Kinect can certainly record faster than that.
As far as I understand, depth values make the blob detection easier. Normally blob detection tries to use the brightness differences caused by 3D objects - depth values make it much accurate.
disappointingly there is still a bit of lag in there. Though I'm sure that can be improved in time. It would be interesting to see him swing the stick around faster, see if the rendering can keep up an still track the stick when it is a blur.
this is a potential killer application. if they manage to make the tracking fluent and accurate, everybody can finally duell other players in epic lightsaber fights. anyone who liked star wars has probably been waiting for this - let's see who gets it right first - PS3 Move, Kinect or even Wii?
He says he's using the OpenCV library. I assume it's got the tracking and rendering functionality already in the library, and he just plugged the Kinect video and IR depth data into it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opencv
It would minimize the destruction caused in your home from swinging around a 4' stick.