This post is half project update, half rant about the Xbox Kinect/Windows Kinect, and the incredible struggle it has been to get the Kinect to "connect" buh dum chee!

It's now been about two weeks of wrestling with these products to talk to my computer. Basically, I tried EVERYTHING! I struggled to get them working on Mac, but had huge problems with out of date software and drivers. A basic summary: Two versions of Open NI: Simple Open NI and Open NI 2.0. After Open NI 2.0 was made the project was shut down, and this was several years ago. Since many new products have come out since, a lot of the tutorials have unanswered recent questions on how to get these new hardware devices to work with old software and old sample code. Also, almost everything you will find online about this is an unorganized mess!! It's scattered around by users instead of put out by the developers. Windows makes the Kinect and Windows or Mac do not really seem to want to make it work easily on a Mac. Fine, I get that. So I downloaded the Bootcamp Windows 8 Partition on my computer. That resulted in a whole slew of other problems, with drivers not working at first, internet not connecting as a result, blah blah blah, got that worked out eventually.

Got everything going and didn't have enough space to install the software. Moral of the story I learned- DO NOT give Bootcamp the minimum amount of space required for installation, cause then it's useless if you want to do anything on it. Reinstalled Bootcamp with more space. Okay! Should work now! NOPE.

I already hated Microsoft a bit, since memories of my insanely slow and old Dell computer at home are pretty much all I associate with the company. But the uninformative website, complete lack of helpful information in error messages, and totally incompetent help phone line has taken my burning hate for Microsoft to a whole new level. I digress, basically, if you have the newest version of the Kinect for Windows (2.0!! NOT IN THE TITLE! THEY DIDN'T NAME TWO VERSIONS DIFFERENTLY!) then, I would assume, if you download the software for the updated SDK 2.0 on the Kinect for Windows website, you will have it working perfect in no time. However, there is an older model of the Kinect for Windows, with a different model number, that is super easy to differentiate because it looks different, and yet there is no place to "click here if your Kinect for Windows looks like this and download the OLDER SDK drivers." Anyways, rant over, that was the solution. The older SDK drivers got the Kinect to connect! Still only running samples, have to figure out how to get the sample code into a compiler that I can pick up and run with for my project. Also still having issues getting Touch Designer working, I have the NIVIDIA graphics card you need, but it seems mine may be a different model. Overall, finally made some progress. Final thoughts: Mac needs to come out with an alternative to the Kinect or better integration! Windows is the worst, forever and always.

TL;DR
I hate Microsoft. Finally got the Kinect to be seen by the computer though.