Kinect: Point Clouds and Face Tracking in AutoCAD

Originally posted by Greg Duncan at http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/kinect/Kinect-to-AutoCAD-v15-and-some-AutoCAD-Face-Tracking-too

Today’s projects takes us back to AutoCAD, with an update to Kean’s last mentioned here, AutoCAD and the Kinect for v1, as well as using Face Tracking inside of AutoCAD…

Integrating Kinect with AutoCAD 2013

As promised in the last post, today we’re going to see the adjusted point cloud import workflow applied to the previously posted Kinect integration samples. This was also an opportunity to look at the improvements in version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows SDK.

Here’s the updated set of samples for AutoCAD 2013 and the Microsoft Kinect SDK v1.5.

The main changes were related to the updated point cloud import workflow, but I also updated the code to allow the user to choose to enter “near mode” (by setting the KINNEAR system variable to 1), and to make sure the reduced set of 10 joints get displayed properly when jigging using either the KINSKEL or KINBOTH commands.

I also tested the British English language pack, and sure enough it did a a much better job of understanding my commands. I’ve left the samples defaulting to US English – just search for and replace “en-US” with “en-GB” (having installed the language pack, of course) to give it a try.

Project Information URL: http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2012/06/integrating-kinect-with-autocad-2013.html

Project Download URL: http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/files/KinectSamples-v1.5.zip

Face tracking inside AutoCAD using Kinect

After discovering, earlier in the week, that version 1.5 of the Kinect SDK provides the capability to get a 3D mesh of a tracked face, I couldn’t resist seeing how to bring that into AutoCAD (both inside a jig and as database-resident geometry).

I started by checking out the pretty-cool FaceTracking3D sample, which gives you a feel for how Kinect tracks faces, super-imposing an exaggerated, textured mesh on top of your usual face in a WPF dialog:

I decided to go for a more minimalist (which also happens to mean it’s simpler and with less scary results approach for the AutoCAD integration: just to generate a wireframe view during a jig by drawing a series of polygons…

… and then create some database-resident 3D faces once we’re done: