I’ve been trying to figure out which libraries and frameworks are best for developing my Kinect application on Linux, and without testing any of the libraries I’ve found for compatibility so far, the search has been really difficult. This paper provides one possible setup, using:

• openFrameworks for essential libraries such as OpenGL, a choice number of audio libraries, and a font library
• ofxOpenNI module, a wrapper for:
  • OpenNI, providing access to the Kinect device and extracting the video stream (unfortunately, the original website was shut down, but there is this site instead)
  • NITE, providing the skeleton tracking capabilities (also shut down with OpenNI)
  • SensorKinect

I’ll look for other papers that have developed Kinect applications and check which of these libraries are absolutely necessary, if at all.

UPDATE: libfreenect (to replace OpenNI) and XKin (to replace NITE) seem to be attractive open-source alternatives.