Getting Started with a Kinect on Windows

Start visualizing data from your Xbox Kinect on windows in less than 10 minutes

Vijayasri Iyer
2 min readJul 8, 2022

Microsoft Kinect RGB-D cameras have become the go-to device for researchers and enthusiast in robotics and computer vision. However, it can be a pain to get the Kinect working on a windows operating system. Today, I will show you a simple way to visualize the output from your Kinect on a windows 10 system. Let’s get started !

RTAB-Map (Real-Time Appearance Based Mapping) is a method of performing Visual SLAM (read more about SLAM here). The creators of RTAB-Map have created a package to use the algorithm with software like ROS (Robot Operating System) on Linux. However, they also have a standalone binary application that can be installed and used on windows.

Step 1 : Go to the RTAB-Map Github repository and download the binary release for windows.

RTABMap Releases

Step 2 : Follow the installation process. Make sure you allow the installation wizard to download the Kinect windows drivers file. Run the file after it has been downloaded, before proceeding.

Step 3 : Open the RTABMap application and select your device.

Select source camera

Step 4 : Simple press the play button and you can start mapping the world with your Kinect !

Kinect Mapping

References

  1. https://introlab.github.io/rtabmap/
  2. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34811

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Vijayasri Iyer

Machine Learning Scientist @ Pi School. MTech in AI. Musician. Yoga Instructor. Learnaholic. I write about anything that makes me curious.