Just got back from a trip up to Scotland to visit my good friends Rob and Judy for the comedy festival.

Since we had a bit of spare time on of the days, Rob and I decided that it would be good fun to try and hook his Kinect up to one of my games. Since I was part through porting the old space invaders game (Aliens Invade) from the iPhone to the Mac app store it seemed like a good opportunity to have a bit of a play.

We initially tried processing the raw depth data ourselves and using this to control the game. This was quite good for controlling the position, but we struggled to find a good algorithm for detecting when the user wanted to fire so decided that we needed a more powerful solution. Fortunately there is OpenNI and NITE which give you person tracking and pose detection.

It works pretty well - and is great fun! Just run left and right to avoid the bullets and wave your hands in the air to fire.

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