Making Things See

Making the Point Cloud Move

So, we’ve entered the third dimension. We’ve got a point cloud displaying our Kinect data in 3D space. And we’ve noticed a couple of interesting ways the point cloud differs from the depth images we’d seen before. But there’s a lot more we can do with point clouds. Now that we’ve created a 3D representation of the Kinect’s data inside of Processing, we can manipulate that in all kinds of ways. For example, if we move the location and orientation of the point cloud, we’ll be able to view the scene from a different angle than where the Kinect is positioned. It’s almost like having the ability to look around corners!

To gain control of where objects and points are positioned, we’ll have to learn a few techniques for navigating ...