How to initialize two Kinect simultaneously? (SkeletalViewer)

Question

I would like to do skeletal tracking simultaneously from two kinect cameras in SkeletalViewer and obtain the skeleton result. As in my understanding, the Nui_Init() only process the threads for first Kinect (which I suppose index = 0). However could I have the two skeletal tracking run at the same time as I would like to output their result respectively into two text files at the same time.

(eg. for Kinect 0 output to "cam0.txt" while Kinect 1 output to "cam1.txt")

Does anyone has experience in such case or able to help?

Regards,

Eva

PS: I read this from Kinect SDK documentation state that:

If you are using multiple Kinect sensors, skeleton tracking works only on the first device that you Initialize. To switch the device being used to track, uninitialized the old one and initialize the new one.

So is it possible if I want to acquire the coordinates simultaneously? Or even if acquire one by one, how should I call them separately? (as I realize the index of the active Kinect will be 0 which I can't differentiate them).

Answer 1

I assume that you are using MS SkeletalViewer example. The problem with their SkeletalViewer is that they closely tied the display and the skeleton tracking. This make it difficult to change.

Using multiple kinect sensor should be possible, you just need to initialize all the sensors the same way. The best thing to do would be to define a sensor class to wrap kinect sensors. If you don't need the display, you can just write a new program. That's a bit of work but not that much, you can probably get a fully working program for multiple sensors in less than 100 lines. If you need the display, you can rewrite the SkeletalViewer example to use your sensor class but that's more tedious.