Real time lightsaber tracking and rendering on the Kinect

To be fair, it’s not like this is necessarily a “final” version. Plus there are limitations on how well a Kinect can track a very thin moving object’s sweeping motion. Making this work smoothly on a fast stroke would require several hundred frames per second on the ranging sensor to track the stick’s entire sweep, something that I don’t think is quite possible with the Kinect hardware. If you’ve ever done lightsaber rotoscoping in After Effects like I have, you know how difficult it can be to determine the edges of the sweep. The Kinect is best for either static readings, or periodic (well under 100 fps, I think) instantaneous readings. Nowhere near enough to do something that smooth. A rough approximation at best.

That said, it might still be possible in a limited way, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing some really cool stuff in the future with some innovative ways of “encouraging” the Kinect to do things we can’t do at the moment. Right now our research group is considering using the Kinect in some robotics projects; it’s a very affordable alternative to a laser scanner and other expensive localization hardware. It’ll be very neat to see what this is able to do in the future.

that would be under the kinects’ resolution. It’s a wide angle lens, and it’s only 640×480, so it’s just not equipped for5 the job at that scale. A shorter stick could easily be used though.

the depth information is used to easily separate the stick from the background. A webcam would only be able to do it if the stick were painted a bright, even colour (a reverse greenscreen) and lit well on all sides.

Using a kinect it can be done independant of the colour of the stick and under lighting conditions.

having depth information means you no longer need a greenscreen.