Chapter 7. Web Applications and Gaming

The Kinect was designed for gaming—naturally, those who have hacked the Kinect wanted to see what types of games they could produce with motion controls. With wrappers for game building applications such as Unity, Processing, and Scratch, developers have taken the Kinect into their own hands and have created a wide variety of game experiences you can enjoy on your own PC.

Install the Zigfu SDK

Zigfu is a recent startup with a lot of promise that specializes in gesture-based gaming. The team comprises Kinect hacking gurus and an assortment of other specialists in fields such as robotics and software engineering. As an added bonus, two former employees of PrimeSense are a part of this gesture-based team whose primary goal is to deliver easy-to-use developer resources to simplify Kinect development.

Zigfu offers a free SDK that provides a set of motion-controlled user interface components, as well as access to the lower-level Kinect data, including hand-point controls, skeleton joint positions and orientations, and depth mapping. The SDK includes bindings to the Unity3D game engine, HTML5/JavaScript, and Flash, allowing developers to create Kinect games and apps either for the browser, using the cross-browser Zigfu browser plug-in, or as native applications.

With Zigfu bindings and libraries installed, you can develop Kinect integrated applications on a wide assortment of platforms, making it the perfect software solution for all your casual Kinect ...

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