Can Kinect be programmed to detect speed of movements, angle measurements etc?

Question

Does anybody know if Kinect is programmable to be able to detect speeds of movement (eg how quick an arm swings) and other metrics such as the angle of certain body parts via skeletal trackeing. In summary, I'm trying to assess Kinect for my sports company
in using video analysis for Golf and what capability Kinect has in this field. Speed of swing, skeletal tracking and angle measuring are all important considerations.
Also, does anybody know of other similar projects in the sports analytics field.
Many Thanks

Answer 1

Hello,
What you described is very easy to implement. With just a few lines of code you can get the Skeleton frames (25 frames per second, featuring the coordinates of up to two users simultaneously).
You can have a look at the
documentation.
In
this post, you can find the code I usually use to set up the Kinect sensor in a WPF application.
As soon as you have the coordinates of the Joints, you can start to calculate their speeds. You'd just need to cache the previous coordinates..
Angles between Joints are just as easy. You can do it with Vector3D. For more complex calculations in 3D, you might want to take a look at TCD.Controls, TCD.Kinect (on NuGet).
I'm sure there are other applications of Kinect in the sports analytics - the only thing that may cause some trouble is when the Kinect can't track the user properly, especially if the user is in some weird conformation. With golf this should work just
fine^
cheers,
~theCake
Life is unsure - always eat the dessert first!