I want to be able to send data from a kinect to an android app

Question

I am working on a dual application on android sdk and kinect sdk. I want to be able to have the kinect send data to a smartphone application. The smartphone application will then give notifications to the user based on the kinect data. The smartphone should be able (hopefully) to turn the kinect on/off and maybe a few other basic commands. How can I get the kinect and smartphone application communicate?

Answer 1

Cool concept, I'm a huge fan of the Kinect (when used on Windows; I think it's a gimmick for the Xbox).

For starters, you can't directly interface with the Kinect from a smartphone. Kinect needs a USB connection, external power, and a Windows 7 machine with a 2.6 GHz dual core processor. So now it becomes a question of connecting a server application running on the Windows 7 machine and a client application on the Android phone. There's a few ways you could do this (USB, WiFi, TCP), but all of them suffer somewhere. USB would tether you to the computer, making the smartphone app redundant (just use the computer since you're already connected to it). WiFi is probably the best choice if you intend to send serious amounts of data, but would only work in your house. TCP (or UDP) could work for some applications, but if you start trying to stream video your phone will hate you.

I'm going to assume you're not going for a data-heavy application (video streaming to phone). If you're just looking to send off notifications from the Kinect to the Android (for example, use the Kinect as a motion detector and send messages to the Android when someone enters the room), similar to a text message update, you could certainly pull off the TCP/IP solution, and probably quite easily. You'd set up a simple TCP server on the Windows 7 computer with the Kinect, and then connect to it with a TCP request (look at the Client side code). Once you've got that set up, it's easy to send messages between the Kinect and the smartphone app. For starters, just try to get a few quick messages sent over. Server says "HI THERE", Android replies "I HATE YOU WINDOWS", etc, and make sure the messages are making it to their destination (TCP pretty much guarantees they will). After you have that running, just build your apps up around it.