Kinect PowerPoint Control for better presentations
Kinect and PowerPoint can be connected together to make awesome PowerPoint presentations. Definitely the future of PowerPoint presentations will include some gesture recognition capabilities as well as other voice recognition and techniques.
Kinect PowerPoint Control is a project open source that you can download to see how Kinect SDK can do basic gesture recognition to control PowerPoint.
It was created by Joshua Blake and requires Kinect for Windows SDK 1.0 and Microsoft Office installed in your computer.
In order to run the examples you need to point the Kinect at you and stand at least five feet away. You can see yourself in the application window and the three ellipses will track your head and hands to calibrate the position.
- Then you can extend your arm to activate the right or forward gesture.
- On the other side, you can extend your left arm to active the left or back gesture.
These gestures will send a right or left arrow key to the foreground application, respectively.
When you are ready, run your PowerPoint presentation and this will remain as a foreground application. The good thing is that once you have started PowerPoint the right and left gestures will go forward and back in your deck.
The ellipses grow and change color when your hand exceeds the threshold of 45 centimeters. The gestures will only activate once as your hand exceeds the threshold, and only one of the gestures can be active at once. You must bring your hand back closer to your body to activate the gesture a second time.
You can continue using the gestures in other applications besides PowerPoint. Especially if you need to run some demos outside of PowerPoint, for example using the slideshow, notepad or any other program.
The speech recognition is also a good feature that you can use to make better presentations. By default voice recognition is disabled due to false positives but in the source code you can uncomment the call to the StartSpeechRecognition() in MainWindow_Loaded() to enable speech recognition.
You can use Kinect PowerPoint control to enable gesture control in your PowerPoint presentations as well as other trend control techniques for example voice recognition and why not in the future also pick by vision techniques.