Kinecting With Orangutans

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Project overview:

This project is a collaboration between The University of Melbourne’s Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces (SocialNUI) and Zoos Victoria.

The project aims to study how digital enrichment can improve the welfare of Melbourne Zoo’s orangutans. This project utilises UNI technologies to give the orangutans a wider range of ways to interact with technology by offering them more active, full body movement.

The installation consists of a Kinect v2 [Kinect for Xbox One] sensor, a short range projector, and a PC, The projector projects a game on the floor inside the orangutan enclosure; the Kinect sensor, with its superior depth sensing and 3D mapping technologies, detects touches on the projected surface and sends data to the game. By using the Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0 we developed software to receive and process the raw depth data, which we  use to detect and track touches on the projected surface.

The Kinect does not need to be placed looking straight down to the projected surface, It can be placed anywhere, looking at any angle, around the projected surface, provided it always maintains a line of sight to the whole projected surface and at a distance no more than 4.5 meters to the farthest point on the projected surface.

 

Project team

Sarah Webber, Marcus Carter, Zaher Joukhadar, and Sally Sherwen

Technologies:

My role in the project:

I led the entire technical and software development side of the project. I developed the software that detects touches on projected area using Microsoft Kinect, I also developed all the games, I used C#, nodejs, Processing programming languages.

Media:

The project attracted large media attention, several newspapers wrote about it, in addition of few TV channels, here are some examples:

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