Kinect setup for the MAC OSX

From Sonal

This blog is copied from
http://www.alan-pipitone.com/index.php/en/blogeng/apple-mac/item/84-use-kinect-with-mac-osx

Introduction

This article is intended for people who have a lot of experience in the Information Technology area, both as a developer and as systems engineer, especially on unix systems. In fact, the installation of the drivers may be a little tricky, especially if something does not go the first time.

I warn you... there are some commands to run with the terminal, I do not take any responsibility if with these commands (or connecting the kinect) you will damage your Mac. However, if you are familiar with the shell (and unix systems) you should not have problems.

The version of Kinect that i have is sold separately from the xBox. It has the power and the USB adapter included in the package. If you have the version bundled with the latest xBox (that doesn't have the adapter with the power supply), you will need this device from the Amazon website.

I connected the Kinect to an iMac with OSX 10.7.4 64-bit. However, if you read the whole article you'll be able to adapt the installation process on different systems without much effort.

Well, now that I have described the tools used for testing, we can install and configure the software and drivers required.

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This is my machine I am attempting to get this working on

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Driver and SDK

Before proceeding you should know that there are several available API and SDK for Kinect. However, the two main SDK are OpenNI and OpenKinect. The first is maintained by the company PrimeSence who developed the technology behind the Kinect, OpenKinect instead is a group of people who formed a community called OpenKinect which issued the library libfreenect.
There is also the official SDK released by Microsoft, but unfortunately it only works on Windows operating systems. I will analyze that in the next articles.

For this tutorial I used OpenNI. This is because that SDK is developed by the company that has created the technology behind the Kinect, and it comes with many examples.
I used a wrapper for Processing (a programming language based on Java) called Simple OpenNI.

Let's start

First of all, open the page with the official procedure to install Simple OpenNI on Mac OSX clicking here. As described above I had to slightly change the installation procedure. Here's how:

1. I download xcode 4 from here. Then I have installed it.
2. I download the version 2.1.2 of MacPorts (the version that is shown in the installation guide is too old) from here. Then I have installed it.
3. I download Java JDK 7 (for Mac OS X x64) from here.
4. I have opened a terminal and ran the command: sudo port install git-core
   if that command returns the following error:
   Unable to open port: can’t read "build.cmd": Failed to locate ‘make’ in path: '/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin' or at its MacPorts configuration time location, did you move it?
   then you have to start xcode,  go to Preferences -> Download and install the "Command Line Tools", then you can try again the command sudo port install git-core.