Comment Lol, you guys are funny (Score 2) 25
There are several reasons for this study:
1) It's a component of an academic study into the effects of 'natural' human-computer interaction on learning and teaching. There sure is a lot of buzz about Kinect at the moment, so studies like this will help to prove just how useful gesture controls could really be. Or not. Open mind...
2) Dynamic Time Warping is a viable but relatively under-explored method for vector-based gesture recording and recognition. It's interesting to see how well this can perform against more established methods.
3) There's not much out there for the Kinect SDK yet, so why not build something nice, like? If it proves to be popular I will refactor into an open-standards form and release for all sensor applications.
4) It's a very immature product and needs a lot of work before it's really useful - hence the open source.
5) Kinect SDK's license is currently research only, but I have it on good authority that this will change soon. I'm not quite sure what to, though.
6) Working on stuff like this is, to me, like playing with Lego. I just enjoy it. I enjoy creating something, investigating, exploring...don't like that? I'm cool with that. But don't bite me for it.
7) I just realised this numbered list could look rude or arrogant. Sorry about that. But I couldn't figure out how to get carriage returns into comments.
8) Another point of KinectDTW is that you can teach it you own gestures. Try it, and if they're unreliably recognised, try tweaking the parameters for your environment. A future development would see dynamic parameters per person/room/gesture for maximum reliability.
9) There is no 9)
10) If you like it, or even if you don't, please keep the feedback rolling in. I like to read you opinions :) And if you can, contribute. I'd really appreciate better minds than mine working on this too.