Post 20: USING THE KINECT

  I bought a Kinect a year ago, and had not managed so far to find software that could recognize joints and move an image with body movements. That would allow a person to control a puppet with Animata, make music with Ableton Live, play the Pacman or any other game Mike comes up with, or map an image to moving dancers.
  Well, I went on the quest again, and came to the conclusion I would have to learn to write some code, and that the easiest one to learn was PROCESSING, which was developed specifically for Artists. I ordered a manual and also a book about the Kinect called "Making Things See".
  In the meantime, I kept searching, and finally found a Blog that offered a practical clear tutorial: "The Blog by GLEN MCPHERSON" 
   It had a link to a great little app written by Ryan Challinor called SYNAPSE. It is available free for Mac or Windows, and allows joint recognition with the Kinect. You stand in front of the Kinect and wait till you get this:

   In order to do something with this, you need a Mac and Apple's Developer Application X-CODE  with QUARTZ COMPOSER. In order for Synapse to communicate with Quartz Composer, you also need a little app called quartz_passthrough that is part of the Quartz Composer example project+plugins on the Synapse web site. 

   Glen McPherson then walks you through the steps of using Quartz Composer:

to control an image on the screen by moving your hand up and down and around in front of the Kinect. Voila!

   It worked great the first time around, but now I am having problems getting it to work again.I keep getting a "port error" message. What the hell is a port? Something else to figure out!