MineCraft + Kinect : Building Worlds! Importing Kinect data into the MineCraft universe. By: Nathan Viniconis

Some basic information about myself is in About me .

Notes has some basic and rough notes that gets appended too during development.

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Thinking of restarting the project...

3/13/2012 By: Nathan Viniconis

MineCraft changed their file format and doubled the height limit!

128 blocks were added to the height of the Minecraft world. With this new height, completely massive structures can be created. I already created a C# project to interface with the Microsoft Kinect driver, and have to focus on figuring out how to conform to the new Anvil file format.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like Minecraft...

4/12/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

So I put Minecraft in Minecraft so you can Mine while you Craft!

A new video has been added to the videos page. Initially i was going to create a video from recordings i took over the weekend. However, the Sun blinded my Kinect and the depth information kept coming out corrupt. Lesson learned, direct sunlight does NOT play well with the Kinect. After about 12 hours it started to work reliably again.

Overview updated and new script available!

3/29/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

Updated the overview page to include a rundown of how to use the scripts in order to create an animation. Also added the updated driverAnimation to the scripts page!

Windows movie generation + Texture Pack!

3/08/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

Minecraft + Kinect animations are once again possible! Minecraft has a bug(vote it up!) where region files are kept open after the world is closed. Now the entire Minecraft application has to be killed between frames. The driveAnimation.py script has been updated to reflect these changes. The logic to move the player through the animation has been removed since the players point of view is now reset upon login.

A simple Texture Pack has been created that makes the resulting images color match better. It's not the best texture pack to use while playing the game however, since most of the textures have been updated to solid colors. Mouse over to see the texture pack changes:



Minecraft 1.3+ save format support added!

2/28/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

The Kinect image to Minecraft save code has been updated to handle the 1.3+ Minecraft save format. The processImages.py script has been updated with improved logging and region handling capabilities. A utility class, MinecraftKinectUtils.py, has been broken out to help generalize functions that are used throughout multiple scripts.

Now the bad news... The 1.3 Minecraft update changed how player rotation works. Whenever you log in the game the rotation of the player that is kept in the file is discarded. Instead of looking in the same direction that you were when you logged out, you are forced facing West. Basically, the point of view of the player now resets when logging in. This makes the frame generation for the voxel physics engine i was working on impractical. I will be trying to go through the normal channels to see if this behavior is intended. Worst case, i'll see what i can do to mod it back to the 1.2 functionality.

Instead of working on the physics engine as intended, i'll be working on an installer and a UI for the Kinect image generation.

Minecraft + Kinect Hack Update 1

2/11/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

Phase three is coming along nicely. The player can now move while the Kinect animates. The Kinect video and path of the player are pre-recorded and linear interpolation is used to move and rotate the player along the path through time. It looks pretty cool!

A utility script has been created to contain all of the Minecraft/Kinect manipulation logic that was being reproduced in multiple scripts. The code has also been cleaned up, and the default values updated to be more streamlined. I'll post again when this code is released to the scripts page.

I am now working on the final (albeit hardest) part of the third phase - world manipulation through the animation. When done i'll create a video to demonstrate it. The next phase will include creating a user-friendly UI, an installer, and a walkthrough for anyone who deems it necessary to create a monument of themselves in their Minecraft world.

Minecraft + Kinect Hack

1/24/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

The goal of this hack is to import the data from the Xbox Kinect, process it, and create various effects in the Minecraft universe.

The project is currently in its third phase. The first phase aimed to take a snapshot from a Kinect and transform it into a Minecraft save file. The depth and color information was used to approximate the position and types of blocks to best represent the 3D point cloud in MineCraft. The second phase aimed to animate the data captured by the Kinect at 30FPS by means of stop-motion animation.

The third phase is currently under development...

Welcome to the new Minecraft + Kinect project page

1/22/2011 By: Nathan Viniconis

When i started this project, i did not expect it to receive any attention other than from my immediate family. The Word document that i used for my notes was saved as a .htm file and then uploaded as my website. As more people started to get directed here, the sub-par quality of the page became readily apparent.

This site will continue to improve over the immediate future.