My biggest fear for this project is being able to setup the hardware and software libraries in such a way that they would be able to work together. In terms of installing the libraries, I ran into a few complications that I had to manually fix myself, but thankfully, there weren’t any major issues I couldn’t solve.

The hardware, however, is a different story, since I couldn’t get the Kinect to be detected by the example programs. It turns out that according to a thread in the OpenKinect Google Group, the second version of the Kinect (v2), which is what the music department has now, doesn’t actually sends infrared images through USB instead of the depth data that libfreenect expects to receive. Moreover, OpenKinect says that I should be seeing the following USB devices through the “lsusb” command:

Bus 001 Device 021: ID 045e:02ae Microsoft Corp. Xbox NUI Camera
Bus 001 Device 019: ID 045e:02b0 Microsoft Corp. Xbox NUI Motor
Bus 001 Device 020: ID 045e:02ad Microsoft Corp. Xbox NUI Audio

Instead, I just get:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 045e:02c4 Microsoft Corp.
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 045e:02d9 Microsoft Corp.

To complicate things even further, the v2 Kinect connects through USB 3.0, but the CS department computers only have USB 2.0 ports. We are currently finding a USB 3.0 to 2.0 adapter to see if that changes anything, but I just ordered a v1 Kinect myself as a backup plan. Time is running short and I’m already falling behind schedule.