== libfreenect
Ongoing Development and Maintenance by the OpenKinect Community
=== Description
libfreenect is the core library for accessing the Microsoft Kinect USB camera. Currently, the library supports access to:
Audio is currently being worked on.
=== Information Resources
Information about the OpenKinect project can be found at
For questions, support, and discussion, check out the google groups mailing list at
http://groups.google.com/group/openkinect
Or the IRC channel at
We are also on twitter at
=== Requirements
For the driver, you'll need
For the glview sample, you'll need
For links to the software listed, see http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started#Dependencies
See the platform specifics section for other information specific to the platform you may be working on.
=== Basic Compiling Instructions
To use CMake:
=== Platform Specifics
==== OS X
NOTE: AS OF 2010-11-16, WE HAVE UPDATED THIS PATCH. IF YOU HAVE ALREADY PATCHED, PLEASE REPATCH AND REINSTALL LIBUSB TO GET OS X WORKING AT FULL 30FPS.
You will need to pull the matching version of libusb for this patch. This is NOT v1.0.8, this is a change based off the repo head as of 2010-10-16. To get a tar.gz with the snapshot of the repo at this point, hit the link below.
Once you've gotten that tarball and unziped it somewhere, patch using the files in platform/osx/. Just go to the root directory of the libusb source and run
patch -p1 < [path_to_OpenKinectRepo]/platform/osx/libusb-osx-kinect.diff
You need to tell configure to include some necessary frameworks: ./configure LDFLAGS='-framework IOKit -framework CoreFoundation'
Recompile libusb and put it wherever CMake will look (/usr/local/lib, /usr/lib, etc...). If you're using a package manager like fink, macports, or homebrew, I'm going to expect you know what your doing and can deal with this. If not, see IRC channel.
OpenGL and GLUT come as prebuilt frameworks with OS X, so that should do it for requirements.
==== Linux
Should "just work" if you have the following packages installed:
If you want to see the glview example:
udev rules are available in the platform/linux directory so that you are not required to run as root.
==== Windows
Windows support is now available in libfreenect. The inf files in the platform/windows directory can be used for installing the device, and the library will need libusb-win32 to compile.
==== Wrappers
libfreenect has interface to several languages. Look in the wrappers/ directory for them:
=== Licensing
The libfreenect project is covered under a dual Apache v2/GPL v2 license. The licensing criteria are listed below, as well as at the top of each source file in the repo.
This file is part of the OpenKinect Project. http://www.openkinect.org
Copyright (c) 2010 individual OpenKinect contributors. See the CONTRIB file for details.
This code is licensed to you under the terms of the Apache License, version 2.0, or, at your option, the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.0. See the APACHE20 and GPL2 files for the text of the licenses, or the following URLs: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
If you redistribute this file in source form, modified or unmodified, you may:
In all cases you must keep the copyright notice intact and include a copy of the CONTRIB file.
Binary distributions must follow the binary distribution requirements of either License.