Kinect 360

[philby85]

Ok, I looked on ebay for second hand 360 kinect. Cheapest I could get was 69.95 plus 9.95 postage (AUD) then I had to buy a power adapter with USB cable which was 20.00 delivered. All up 100.00.
I checked with my local game store and I picked up one with cables and adaptor for 42.00 Bargain !

I downloaded SDK 1.8 installed and tested. Seemed to be hit and miss and I had to stand right in line with it, but for what I paid no problems.
I read through the forum and found a suggestion to train it a few times. Wow ! I can be anywhere in the room and it will pick me up. I am getting between 90-96 % accuracy.
My boundary mic was good, but I was never able to get it to recognise me while media was playing, the kinect can, most of the time.

So, impressed so far.

cheers

Phil

[vulcanjedi]

Wow seriously? I tried this way way back so maybe old version of drivers/sdk
But it was absolutely atrocious.
Bad accuracy, bad input, tons of ambient noise and forget if something was playing.
May have to give this another go sometime

[jitterjames]

I also had pretty disappointing results with the Kinect.  It could be the drivers, or it may come down to quality control and a difference in the actual microphone array on each unit.

[wiseoleweazel]

Hi everyone. This is my first post on the forums, and to be honest the first time I have posted in a forum for some time. I saw this post and wanted to give my experience as it's been quite positive.

I have a 360 version of the kinect sensor that I am using alongside vox commando and it has the best reception and clarity for vox commando of any device I have used with the software. I am not 100% sure if this is because of newer drivers etc but it's been great using the kinect for this purpose.

My understanding is that it uses an array of microphones giving it much greater redundancy than a dedicated microphone. I had decent success with my headset mic which is a microsoft lifechat lx 3000, but the kinect blows it out of the water, in fact I was stunned (as a techie) on how far away from and how low I could speak and still have commands understood without having to repeat them etc.

I was stood outside the room of operation at the top of the stairs which is a good 20ft or so and beyond the doorframe to the bedroom. I had no idea anyone had any problems with them, just saying my experience with the kinect 360 sensor has been stellar.

In regards to the ambient noise and not hearing people over whatever is playing, I am using a program called FAAST, and once I have it sorted the plan is to simply hold my hand forward to ask it to listen for commands via vox commando by coming out of stand by and also reducing the volume or pausing the movie.

[Haddood]

Here as well I am having positive experience with Kinect ... and compared to array mics it is a pretty good deal even at 100 (got mine on ebay for 60 +10 for power supply, all delivered)

In regards to the ambient noise and not hearing people over whatever is playing, I am using a program called FAAST, and once I have it sorted the plan is to simply hold my hand forward to ask it to listen for commands via vox commando by coming out of stand by and also reducing the volume or pausing the movie.

I have been looking for a similar solution  ... can you elaborate about FAAST installation ?

thanks

[wiseoleweazel]

Well at the moment I am not having much in the way of success with any other method of visual gesture control in xbmc, kinemote is hard to find a download for. I am using kinemote light and well lol, that's just pathetic from my standpoint.

I have also tried a few others, kinect remote (kinemote's ancestor) and the kinect adapter for xbmc. The last of which had the most if limited success.

FAAST, has a very nice interface for seeing what the kinect is seeing (skeletal data, depth data etc) and you can switch between upper and full body modes. It works by setting up a series of events that trigger key presses and is by far the most successful program I have used so far for the purpose.

I have used it in one game so far (crysis 2) in which I used another voice app + FAAST to change weapons, shoot, jump etc. I will actually upload a video to youtube to demonstrate if that's allowed on the forum.

If you want to take a closer look go to http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/faast/

Or take a look here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZNBw_0fVFk

I think so far this will be the best option (for me) to get a workable visual control system working without issues getting in the way. That combined with vox commando should be a powerful combination. Will post a video on my progress as soon as I can.

[nime5ter]

Those of you with Kinects -- have any of you installed the latest version of VC2 (2.1.0.3) and tried the new experimental Kinect audio settings?

http://voxcommando.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=ChangeLog#Version_2.1.0.3

[Haddood]

I tried the new kinect feature a bit ...
I did not have the beam angle event triggered ...

I can't say that I noticed a difference. Specially since I added sound filters (noise gates, eq and AGC) I get almost always more than 90% confidence true positives ... And those that are not get handled by the adaptive confidences functions

As far as I know if I choose the kinect stream it will by pass the sound filters .... If there is a way I will do more testing

[jitterjames]

Well I guess it is not of any use to you personally.

Beam events are not activated yet, but I'm not sure how useful they are anyway to be honest.

Acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression and beam forming are all built in if you enable audio streaming, so no, you cannot and in any case probably should not apply additional third party manipulations to the audio.

[jitterjames]

Automatic gain control is also an option but it is generally not recommended for speech recognition.

If you do use Kinect for speech recognition you should probably set the input level to 10 percent or less

[Haddood]

Great ... Will give it another try .....
Question: can I run 2 instances Vox commando (from different folders) one is Spanish using kinect and one is standard in English ? Or both have to use SP ?

[Haddood]

Beam angle can be very useful in open space implementation

As if you say 'turn on the light'  beam angle can tell VC that the command came from the dinning area... Or kitchen or sitting ... Etc . For sure that will depends a lot on the room arrangement

[Kalle]

Great ... Will give it another try .....
Question: can I run 2 instances Vox commando (from different folders) one is Spanish using kinect and one is standard in English ? Or both have to use SP ?

Yes, to run two or more instances of VC, create for both a link on the desktop. Go to properties and put at the end of the target -new
You can use for both different settings - in this way I use english for music/video and german for home automation.

see example picture

[jitterjames]

Beam angle can be very useful in open space implementation

As if you say 'turn on the light'  beam angle can tell VC that the command came from the dinning area... Or kitchen or sitting ... Etc . For sure that will depends a lot on the room arrangement

Sounds good in theory. I found the beam angle was constantly changing in my initial tests. Rather annoying.

[Haddood]

My tests with the developer toolkit was pretty good ... Might you kinect be with some issues ?