// the find
shiffman/OpenKinect-for-Processing
For use of libfreenect in processing
A Processing library wrapping libfreenect and libfreenect2 to get depth, RGB, and point cloud data out of Kinect v1 and v2 sensors. It's aimed at creative coders and artists who want to do computer vision or interactive installations without writing C++. The hardware it supports is discontinued and the repo hasn't been touched since 2020.
Ships pre-compiled native binaries for Mac, Windows, and Linux so you don't need to build libfreenect yourself — this was genuinely hard to set up in the Kinect era. The example set covers the practical use cases well: depth thresholding, point clouds with OpenGL shaders, multi-Kinect setups, and RGB-depth alignment. Supporting both v1 and v2 with a consistent API is useful since the two sensors use completely different underlying drivers. The JNA-based JNI bridge for the v2 driver avoids requiring users to run a separate build toolchain.
The Kinect v1 was discontinued in 2017 and the v2 in 2017 as well — you can't buy these new, and USB3 controller compatibility for the v2 was already a lottery in 2015. The README has placeholder text ('Requirements?', 'supported versions??') that was never filled in, which signals the project was never fully polished. No release tags or versioning — the library.properties says 3.0 but there's no changelog or migration guide between versions. No support for the Azure Kinect (successor hardware using the k4a SDK), so anyone still doing depth-sensor work in Processing has no upgrade path from this library.