Earlier this summer I picked up a freelance Kinect gig. The client was pretty adamant about using the official Kinect SDK from Microsoft. The SDK is only available for Windows and as a Mac user, I had to make the decision wether or not to purchase a new Windows machine, try a virtual machine solution or use Bootcamp.
Purchasing a dedicated Windows box was the least risky, but the thought of having two computers around was not that appealing. Add to that the fact that the hardware specs on most consumer PC laptops are pretty limited compared to a the Mac and it is becomes harder to make an argument in favor of making the new purchase.
Knowing that the Kinect SDK required quite a large number of dependencies including both drivers and frameworks and that it requires considerable integration with actual hardware, the virtual machine option seemed pretty uncertain.
The last option, partitioning my disk and running Windows via Bootcamp became the most desirable solution. Still for many of the same concerns as running a virtual machine, I was certain that all of the drivers and frameworks would play nicely with Windows running on my Mac.
Just for clarity, here are my laptop specs:
Unibody Mac Book Pro
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Ram
128 GB Solid State HD
I ultimately ended up using Cinder and the KinectSDK block written by my friend Stephen Schieberl and documented here: http://forum.libcinder.org/topic/kinect-sdk-block and here: http://www.bantherewind.com/kinect-sdk-block-for-cinder.
The point of this article is to broadcast that it is not only possible to run the Kinect SDK on a Mac but that it works very well. I won’t go into detail about the installation process. Essentially you need to install Windows and then all of the dependencies for the SDK which are documented on the Kinect SDK website.
If you are running into problems, feel free to leave a question in the comments section or e-mail me personally.
Have you ever tried to install directly on OS X system? It was a completely nightmare for me
I tried to install OpenNI drivers in order to get skeleton data, but no chance.
I wonder, is it possible to pass skeleton data to Flash from Cinder. And I’m really curious about the performance and framerate on Cinder?
Hi Alp,
Yeah, I first started with the OpenNI libs and Cinder on OSX. You’re right that it can be pretty challenging to get up and running. Once all of the drivers are installed though it is pretty simple to get skeleton data with the BlockOpenNI wrapper. As for performance with Cinder, it is about as fast as you can get. However, it is in c++, which is a new set of challenges unto itself. This is one of the better tutorials on installing OpenNI.
Thanks for the sources Jeremy. I’ll give it a try .)
Hi, do you mean⋯⋯the first we should install Windows VM and then install the OpenNI SDK?
Hi, how much space did you put for the partition of the disk?
Hi Erika,
I have since uninstalled Windows from my Mac, but if I remember correctly I had use somewhere around 30 gigs to install Windows and all of the required SDKs. Thanks for writing!
~Jeremy