Hello all! I Hope you’re prepared to join the numerous hackers that are gearing up for the launch of the Kinect for Windows platform. I’ll be presenting the key concepts behind the Kinect, along with some compelling applications in games for THATCamp Games, hosted at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities on Friday.

Sound interesting?

Bring your Kinect, bring a laptop (Mac or PC) along with the following setup instructions, and we’ll explore the potential for this groundbreaking platform.

For this demo, we’ll be taking advantage of the cross-platform capabilities of Adobe Flash, though you are welcome to follow along using the SDK provided by Microsoft in Visual Studio. Flash provides a fairly close analogue to their API.

For Friday, there’s a few things you need to do to prepare for the most productive workshop experience:

• First, if you haven’t already, download a copy (a trial copy will work) of Adobe Flash Builder 4.6 from Adobe’s website.
• Download the latest Kinect SDK.
  • For windows, this is on microsoft’s site.
  • For Mac, the instructions below are from the AIRKinect’s site:
    1. Install Macports: http://www.macports.org
    2. Execute the following command in Terminal: sudo port install libtool
    3. Execute the following command in Terminal: sudo port install libusb-devel +universal
    4. Download & install OpenNI OSX binary (unstable): http://www.openni.org/
    5. Download & install Nite OSX binary (unstable): http://www.openni.org/
    6. Download & install SensorKinect: https://github.com/avin2/SensorKinect
• Next download the files for the ANE (Adobe Native Extension) at https://github.com/AS3NUI/AIRKinect.

I’ll post the notes from the workshop along with all demo files here after the workshop itself.

Hope to see you there!