Kinect Analysis

Interactive systems supporting gesture tracking and whole-body interactions are becoming increasingly popular. However, the development and evaluation of such systems remains challenging due to insufficient tool support. This thesis presents Kinect Analysis — an extensible user-interaction recording and analysis system based on Kinect. The implemented prototype facilitates recording, visualization and analysis of user interactions based on skeletal, audio and video data. Kinect Analysis features a timeline-based approach to manually and automatically annotate recording sequences. Analysis tools include traces, heatmaps and a scripting language to query recordings. In a three-step evaluation, we investigated the capabilities of Kinect Analysis to support user studies. Results suggest that Kinect Analysis simplifies the evaluation of interactive gestureand/or speech-based systems. Moreover, a set of guidelines is introduced that complements the features of Kinect Analysis for conducting user studies based on Kinect or similar devices.