Increasing kinect application development productivity by an enhanced hardware abstraction

Designing and implementing the interaction behavior for body tracking capable systems requires complex modeling of actions and extensive calibration. Being the most recent and successful device for robust interactive body tracking, Microsoft's Kinect has enabled natural interaction by the use of consumer hardware, providing detailed and powerful information to designers and developers, but little tooling. To fulfill this lack of adequate tools for helping developers in the prototyping and implementation of such interfaces, we present Kina, a toolkit that makes the development not fully conditional to the existence of a sensor. By providing playback capabilities together with an online movement database, it reduces the physical effort found while performing testing activities. Copyright 2012 ACM