[KNOWN ISSUE] Movement Tracking with Kinect & Macbook M2

[LuciaPineda]

Hello.

My name is Lucia Pineda. I am a Dancer and Choreographer from Mexico currently immersing myself in media-art and interdisciplinary Art at an Artistic Residency in South Korea.

I am reaching out to you because I have a performance by December 18th that combines video and movement in nature and stage research. I am exploring the Isadora software which is really amazing but very new to me; I am doing the best I can by myself but I do not have previous experience and I am lacking knowledge on the software.

I have been having consultations with a new-media artist the past days and we discovered that Isadora’s plug in OpenNi for movement tracking is not working on my mac, It seems that the reason is that my computer has an M2 chip and the operating system is also very new (Ventura 13.0.1) I literally bought the computer a week ago. We tried to fix the problem with different options; we enabled Rosetta as well, but nothing seems to work.

We reported it to Troikatroniks and they say currently recently they became aware of the issue with OpenNI Tracker on Apple computers running with M2 chips.

At this time they do not have a fix for the problem.
Unfortunately, the library used to do the tracking is from a third-party and is created only for Intel processors. Additionally, the company that created the library is out of business. They have done their best to keep this plugin compatible with newer machines, but given that they do not have the source code for this library, there is little more they can do.

I am very worried because my performance is approaching and I have not been able to get it to work; I have looked for someone to lend me a Mac with an M1 chip but there is no one available in the residence since everyone will be using their computers. I tried it with my old computer, a Huawei with Windows 10 but it no longer has memory and the program does not run.

I don't know what else to do, someone here who can offer me their services and help me achieve movement tracking in some other way, with some other patch.

I will pay for your services, please. I'm terrified I won't make it in time.
Thank you all for your help.

[bonemap]

@luciapineda

If you have a recent iPhone the Zig Sim Pro app uses the on board LiDAR camera to provide real-time body motion tracking that can be output as OSC data that can then be used in Isadora.

It is a bit to setup, but may be achievable.

Best wishes

Russell

[RIL]

@luciapineda Hola ! Quizás se puede pensar en una alternativa al tracking para obtener un resultado parecido.

Quedo a tu disposición para intentar buscar una solución.

Saludos cordiales,

Maxi Wille RIL

[jandraka]

@luciapineda

Quizas esta app pueda ser útil https://github.com/LingDong-/V...

[DusX]

@luciapineda said:

Huawei with Windows 10

 What type of Kinect do you have? Is it the newer Kinect One (version 2) ?
If you have this Kinect, you may be able to use Kinect2share, I made this software a while ago to make it possible for Mac users to interface a Windows machine to get Kinect data.

[DusX]

I also replied to your support ticket with information about using Eyes actor to do tracking. 
I thought I would share the sample patch I made for you here incase it is useful to anyone else.

example_eyes-color-tracking-scene.izz

[LuciaPineda]

Hello everyone, thank you very much for all your suggestions, I am working with Nic Sandilan, hopefully we will find a solution today. I am going to try all the options!

Thank you all!

[jandraka]

@luciapineda

Hola Lucia,

He hecho un FFGL plugin en Vuo (only mac) que genera un stream NDI cuando conectas la Kinect V2 (podria ser tambien la V1). Si utilizas la app "NDI Virtual Input" puedes acceder a la imagen de la Kinect en la app "VisionOSC" eligiendo el numero de cámara y aplicando los cambios.

Espero que te pueda ayudar.

Javi     

 KinectNDI

[Woland]

@luciapineda said:

I will pay for your services, please. I'm terrified I won't make it in time.

If you have funds to pay for services, find an equipment rental place near you and rent an Intel or M1 Macbook Pro or Macbook Air, or an M1 Mac Mini, or even a cheap Windows computer and use that for the piece.

If you really need something on your computer too, then also rent a Gigabit ethernet router and pick up some Cat6 ethernet cable, then use OSC to keep the two computers communicating for whatever you need them to send each other (video over NDI or data over OSC).

[vixmedia]

Before the NI plugin was available -- we used Syphon to capture the Kinect information into Isadora.

Good luck. 

Here is a video from 6 years ago showing how this worked.