How to install both Windows and Open Source Kinect drivers

Question

I'm able to get both the open source kinect drivers and the Windows drivers working correctly for my xbox kinect, but I am not able to keep both on the same machine when using one or the other. What is the reason for that? And what can I do so that I don't have to totally uninstall all Kinect related things when I am testing out a gesture library that might be open source or require the Windows Kinect SDK?

Answer 1

On Windows you can only have 1 driver per device, so I'm afraid you can't use both OpenKinect/libfreenct and the Kinect for Windows(MS Kinect SDK) at once.

However you can either use OpenNI 1.5.x with this Kinect-OpenNI bridge, or OpenNI 2 with Kinect for Windows

I assume it might be simpler to use a single kinect library. Nite(which ships with OpenNI) provides some gestures. I'm not sure if the latest Kinect for Windows does too.

You can still use skeleton tracking to implement your own gestures. You can use a number of algorithms, for example Dynamic Time Warping (here's a Kinect for Windows library) I also recommend having a look at Gesture Recognition Toolkit(GRT) as it provides a number of various algorithms nicely explained wiki and since it's generic you can use with either openni or kinect for windows (not to mention wiimotes/IMUs/etc.)