Creating an interactive logo

While testing the Kinect, I came up with the idea to make the game’s loading logo a little more interesting. I wanted the players to be able to wave their arms to mess up the logo, like liquid.

To do this i would need a Pixel class to manage its movement, and a method to add the pixels. I started by making the method (using  Visual Studio’s class and method generation helpers, it seemed easier to do it this way)

First i would get the position on screen, then cycle through all the pixels. After getting their color i would generate a new Pixel. Checking the total RGB value helps me filter out pixels that are too dark, i only need the logo after all. If i want a multi colored logo, I simply change the “Color.Crimson” to “color” and i will get the image’s orignial value.

PhysicsPixel’s Draw

In the Pixel’s Update class (in the picture its in the Draw class, it has since then been moved to Update) I would go though all the available Cursors (mouse pointer, kinect hands, touch inputs, etc.) and check if the distance is less than the sensitivity i set when creating the Pixel. If it is, I would calculate the direction, and apply the distance to move the Pixel’s position.

In the picture i would also draw the pixel now, this is the only part that stayed in the Draw method after moving over to Update.

Finally, at the end of Update, I would move the Pixel back towards its origin, the speed it returns is different depending on whether the player has interacted with it or not.

In my final version I also added a Boolean to allow me to turn on or off the “return to home”

End Result

The final result! It looks and feels amazing, i also tried it on WP7, but I will need to optimize it before that is usable.

Screenshots while following DigitalErr0r’s Kinect tutorial

http://digitalerr0r.wordpress.com/category/kinect/

Displaying the RGB stream:

Displaying the Depth stream:

Displaying the Skeleton Stream