Multi Players in Kinect World

Inspiration

We wanted to experience/learn with Microsoft Kinect for Windows V2, skeletal tracking, VR, and Unity

What:

Allow multiple players with Kinects to interact/see each other in a virtual environment.

How:

Countless hours of looking up documentations and solving various problems due to deprecated features.

Challenges:

We never got a chance to experience with the Oculus due to miscommunication with organizer 🙁 .Only works on PC & Windows. Deprecated libraries. Microsoft drops support for Kinect V2 for Windows and it hasn’t been updated since 2014 (the release of Windows 8). Synchronization among Kinect is super complicated and unsupported so we spent many hours messing with standard unity networking utility, websocket, NodeJS, and socket.io, etc

Accomplishments:

Partially working synchronizing movement between Kinects

Learned:

Despite running into numerous problems due to deprecated libraries and problems due to unsupported Kinect, we thoroughly enjoyed hacking the Kinect and solving these challenges.We picked up various new technologies during this weekend and got a good glimse into VR as well as game development

What’s next for Multi Players in Kinect World

Enhance synchronization and animation in real time so multiple players have the most responsive experience!

Github: https://github.com/megatran/UnityMultiPlayerWithNodeJS