On The Right Track

by freshfunkee

Last weekend the project went through a complete overhaul. There was a lot of restructuring, deleting, building and writing to get the new GUI up and running. Most of this work was removing OpenCV and stripping back the Kinect API to a bare minimum skeleton tracker. The new HandMonitor class now controls all user input and handles all sound engine and GUI events. There is plenty of ground work put in for future feature implementation also, so this should speed up things in the long run.

I decided to remove OpenCV once I knew I would be stripping back the Kinect RGB camera features for the new GUI. I have translated this work into the form of a custom matrix that contains each of the skeleton joint positions which SDL will use to draw an image at each location. Since then, the performance has increased and become more responsive and it uses less memory when running.

Main.cpp has also been reduced to simple initializing the classes. All the alogrithim work has been put into the new HandMonitor class which handles all GUI and sound engine states.

I’m feeling more confident about the project at this point. It’s starting to look presentable and the foundations have been made for future work which puts me at ease. I’m not totally sure if it’s impressive or not or even if it will be strong enough to be classified as a FYP, but I’m starting to enjoy building and developing it. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever drawn something on paper (the GUI), and implement it practically 1:1.