Tracking

General

The main tracking device is Microsoft Kinect v2. As a general experience I made in the early stages of this project, I can report that Kinect v2 is very picky in terms of USB controllers.

Firstly the device only runs on USB 3.0 Ports. Secondly the USB 3.0 has to have a Chipset made by Intel or Renesas, other manufacturers (i.e. VIA) are not supported. For my home setup, I chose this USB 3.0 controller: http://goo.gl/6yULCG

My PCs is based on the Socket 775 plattform and therefore has no native USB 3.0 support. Furthermore the mainboard still uses the PciExpress 1 standard. That's important because being on this standard it is not enough to install the USB 3.0 controller in a PciEx x1 slot. It doesn't provide enough bandwith for the Kinect to work on it. You have to install the controller in, at least a PciEx x4 slot to make it work. The frame rat on my system is 30fps.

Right now there are two different approaches to connect the device to UE4:

1. Kinect 4 Windows v2 - Unreal Engine Plugin
2. FAAST (VRPN Server) - Kinect v2 Version

Kinect 4 Windows (K4W) Plugin

Approch number one - the K4W-Plugin - is set up by checking out the repository (preferably on the latest branch) of the plugin on Github. As of now (Nov. 21st 2014), 4.5.0 is the current version and can be found here: https://github.com/lion03/UE4-K4W-Plugin/tree/KinectV2Plugin-4.5

Right now it is neccessary to fully compile the version of the engine that contains the plugin. So basically, what one gets from the referenced repository is a full version of UE4 containing the Kinect integration.

To get the idea of using the Kinect integration in one's own project, there's an example project that shows how the Kinect functionalities are used in the editor (the author is using blueprints in his example, so there is no example on how to access the data from the source code): http://goo.gl/dnG4zA

To be continued...