What UI designs are a good fit for the Kinect / PrimeSense DevKit?

Question

Now that the manufacturer released the open source drivers, I'm interested in seeing what User Interfaces work well with this platform.

Please share any links, source code, or commentary relevant to the Kinect or DevKit UI.

Answer 1

I couldnt find opportunity to test Kinect personally but from what i read and hear lack of a UI guideline is the main drawback facing Kinect community, no one solution to standart actions like back, delete, stop or so on in games or other interaction, all dependent on game developers creativity..

Main success of iphone GUI was we were finding same solutions to some needs in all of the first apps and still most of them rely on them.. Experience makes usage better this way, or else inventions will be made but settling of the experience will be hugely delayed..

Answer 2

Here is an in-depth analysis of Kinect UI done by usabilty expert Jakob Nielsen: Kinect Gestural UI: First Impressions

Answer 3

In the time since first inquired, Microsoft has improved their SDK (now up to v1.6) and released a Human Interface Guidelines document. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/

Included with the SDK is a Developer Toolkit package, which includes two items that would be of interest to this question:

1. Human Interface Guidelines documentation for Kinect for Windows applications
2. BasicInteractions-WPF example application, which demonstrates the above guidelines in action.

These two, along with other examples included in the toolkit, give a very good picture of good UI design for gesture based systems -- per Microsoft's vision.

The toolkit can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx

Answer 4

If you have some budget you could check out the top10 games for Wii and Kinect. I suppose some of the Wii gestures are adaptable to the Kinect world and are easy to learn and clever. That would be a way of going there by try and learn rather than through a theoretical documentation.

Some quick ideas about controlling the Kinect:

• Your body controls a 3d skeleton
• Tennis like move with an arm to hit objects
• Wave around slowly to move objects
• Bow forwards to accept (cultural gesture)
• Head left-right to deny (cultural gesture)
• Two handed pinch for zoom in/out
• Point somewhere to highlight stuff (don't know how precise the camera works)
• Military hand gestures (should be readable very precisely)
• Hands to eyes for search
• Sword style arm movement for fighting with a weapon