#7 Kinect Wonderland

To confess, I used most of my time to do the reading in my Essay Assigment preperation. I also spend time to work on AIN (thankfully Zui gave us one week allowance that saves our life, without that week time, we can't show the project at all). And I spend time with family and friends in this CNY Holiday. 

I only spend 2 days in learning AS3 and Kinect. 

With my working experience and research practise in coding, I can do research faster than my classmates. And make decision faster. I've no Kinect with me throughout CNY break. The first day right after CNY break we need to show our Alpha already (but we just got our equipment collected the week before CNY, how can it be possible? is it human enough?). Anyway, to show that we are responsible to the project requirement, in meeting the basic alpha requirement, we try to get the design finalized, and show some of the exploration of Kinect working with Flash AS3.0. 

Since I don't have Kinect with me at home, all I can do in the CNY is to familiarize the common practise of other users in using Kinect. I learnt that I'll need few third party installer to bridge the hardware - Kinect, to the software - Adobe Flash. I prepared all the files and go into IIS earlier to install the and get Kinect working fine with the computer.

It's not a very smooth process. The college PC given to us has the Kinect driver installed with error. We can't even run the default Kinect application from Microsoft smoothly. With the Jazmi the tutor assistance, we discover that it's not the problem of the Kinect. Other group's PC are working fine. So I know that the software PC needs to be switched or I need to use my personal laptop to do all the testing. I took very long time to familiarize ourselves with the potential problems hardware and hardware could have. 

After I decided to use my laptop, I followed the tutorial online, few of them, and it's still not working smoothly as how the tutorial said. 

Reading through online comments and questions from other people who faced the same problem as mind, I realised the risk of using AS3 is too high. It could lead to a not working final product at the same time wasting too much time to get the basic detection work. So I made a tough decision. Since other Kinect explorer also mentioned Processing as a graphical authoring tools for Kinect, and I have some introduction knowledge towards it, I am willing to give it a try. Picking up C# or other programming language is too difficult for me. Although I really try to understand and consider about it, but I think it's too difficult to relearn a totally new programming language compared to Processing which I still have some knowledge to start with.