During Summer 2014, I had the chance to work on a Kinect v2 “Speech Bubbles” app, built upon a sample project from Kinect MVP Tom Kerkhove. In the initial version, I added a speech bubble gets displayed above a person’s head when the person walks into view.

However, this created a problem for multiple people. It was displaying the same text for every person who walked into view, up to 6 people. So, I decided to update the program to display a new random message every time a new person is detected.

I quickly discovered that this created yet another problem: all the displayed messages would get updated for everyone, even when only 1 new person entered the frame. Finally, I added an array of displayed messages (one for each detected body), so that everyone gets their own randomized text.

Now, it was ready to test in the wild… so I used it at HackUMBC, a hackathon event at the University of Maryland Baltimore College.

•  More Pics from HackUMBC: https://wakeupandcode.com/hackumbc/

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