Lets celebrate this Holi without getting our hands dirty. Drum Roll... Kinect based Gesture Controlled Robotic arm using Arduino. This Arduino based project can be implemented by using open source libraries that are easily available.
Arduino is a single board micro controller designed to make applications that are based on interactive control. First Introduced in 2005, Arduino became popular among professionals and hobbyists equally. The applications designed were usually based on human interaction by using various sensors including Kinect. An Arduino board is designed around an 8-bit microcontroller, or a 32-bit ARM. It features include USB interfacing, analog interfacing. It also features GPIO pins which allows interfacing of additional boards. A simple integrated IDE (integrated development environment) allows users to write programs for Arduino using C language. The Arduino software is published as open source which can be regularly extended by programmers. Since Arduino is based on ATMEGA8 and ATMEGA168, the circuit module designs are published under a Creative Commons license. This allows for improvement in designs as it can be accessed by everyone.
This project involves use of two main libraries for tracking of the fingers by the sensor, Kinect in this particular case. The first library is used for depth tracking of the fingers. This works by developing a contour of the hand and estimating the endpoints of the fingers using the inflection points in the curvature of the contour. The depth maps can be developed by OpenNI. The next library is for depth map processing.
Try it out for a fun tech powered holi.
Play safe.