SketchingWiki

This Project is a very nice way to combine the kinect and the leap motion. It is based on an application called Spectral Kinect. More information about the original project you can find here

The idea: If there is someone in front of the kinect the skeleton will appear as a spectral and you can control it by movement. If there is nobody, the spectral will transform into the default ball and move around. With the leap motion you can control two different effects. By moving the hand in y direction you can control the Background effect and its speed. By moving the fingers forward and backward you can control the effect on the skeleton. These two effects come from the application spectral kinect. But both effects have been modified to make it easier to include the controlling of the leap motion

The following image shows the main patch of the application.

On the left side is a switch with what you can start the program and the subpatch that includes the kinect and its skeleton vizualisation. On the right side is a default skeleton for the case that no kinect is available. It simulates a skeleton in an advantageous position. Both sides end up in the subpatch ParticleEffect. This is the most important part of this project. In the end all the data ends up in a renderer and represents the effect.

This subpatch contains the two effects from the spectral kinect and the controlling via the leap motion. The first effect is shown in the following picture. This effect is for the body.

The input box contains different settings that you can make to change the effect that it has on the skeleton. Further it has a reset function intigrated and information about the current position. The Vector node that connects to the SetSlice-node represents the value from the leap motion that determines the strength of the effect. If you want to use there any value that can become negative than you have to form the absolute of it. Otherwise mistakes in the program could encounter.
The second effect is for the background and is shown in the following picture.

Also here the input box contains different settings that you can make to change the effect. The leap motion value goes into the first SetSlice-node to control the speed of the effect. What means if the value gets near zero the background will stop and if it gets higher the background will fall faster. All the other nodes of the effect determine the position and direction where particles will go and appear. It includes a contingency where and how the particles go. Both effects are united in a texture and represent the output of the subpatch.

The patch also contains a little display that shows the performance. Because this application needs a lot of performance it won´t work flowy in fullscreen with the most middle class computers.

The complete patch you can download here

The video demonstration you can find here