Kinect Client Server System V0.2

The Kinect Client Server System V0.2 adds the possibility to V0.1 to watch Kinect Color and Depth data over a network, and to navigate the rendered 3D scene.

To support data transfer over TCP, the Kinect Client Server System (KCS system) contains a custom build implementation of Run Length Encoding compression.

To both maximize compression and improve image quality the KCS system uses a jitter filter

Introduction

Version 0.1 of the KCS system allowed the display of Kinect data in a Windows Store app. This is a restricted scenario: for security reasons, a Windows Store app cannot make a network connection to the same PC it is running on, unless in software development scenarios. Version 0.2 overcomes this restriction by:

1. Support for viewing Kinect data from another PC.

2. Providing the 3D-TV viewer from the Windows Store (free of charge).

Of course, V0.2 is an open Source project, the code and binaries can be downloaded from The Byte Kitchen’s open Source project at CodePlex.

Usage

The easiest way to start using the KCS system v0.2 is to download 3D-TV from the Windows Store, navigate to the Help-About screen (via the ‘Settings’ popup), click on the link to the online manual and follow the stepwise instructions.

The general usage schema is depicted below.

The PC called Kinect server runs the KinectColorDepthServer application. In order for the client PC running 3D-TV to find the server PC on the network, the server PC must be connected to gigabit Ethernet (cabled computer network, say) with a network adapter carrying the IP address 192.168.0.20. The IP address of the Ethernet adaptor of the PC running 3D-TV must satisfy 192.168.0.xxx, where 0 <= x <=255. It is wise to expect that required data capacity is well over 100Megabit/second.

The online manual also provides a complete description of the keyboard keys to be used for navigating around a Kinect scene.

More information

In a few more blog posts, I will discuss more technical details of the new features in the KCS system V0.2, specifically the jitter filter that is to stabilize the Kinect imagery and help in data compression, and the data compression itself.