Installation Part 2 (for Mac OS X)

What if I have Windows 7 instead?

Camera Setup

Figure 1: Checkerboard placed on the desk at the center of the interaction region.

Figure 2: After camera calibration, check for ghosting. If ghosting is present, try calibrating again.

In this section, the commands will all be run from the shell. Open up a Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) and change to the NimbleSDK directory using 'cd /Path/To/NimbleSDK'.

  1. Run the guided physical setup program: ./camerasetup.sh and adjust the physical orientation of the cameras according to the instructions. Place the checkerboard at the center of the workspace (See Figure 1) to begin. At the end of the camera setup, your cameras will be calibrated to your workspace.

    Troubleshooting:

    • If you're having trouble getting the ./camerasetup.sh to start up at all, check the Troubleshooting section.
    • If the image shown by the program is overly dark (or overly bright), the program may have trouble detecting the checkerboard. Use the contrast slider to adjust the appearance of the checkerboard.

  2. If you're using two cameras (not recommended): Test the camera calibration by running: ./cameracalibrationtest.sh. If there is a lot of ghosting, repeat step 2 (See Figure 2).

Quick-Start Hand Calibration

Figure 3: The system computed the correct (smaller) scale when the hands are in the spread pose.

By default, the hand tracking server runs in calibration mode.
./nimble_server.sh

Spread out your fingers to calibrate the scale of your hands (See Figure 3). After about a second, the system will converge to the correct scale.

There's usually no harm in keeping the hand tracking server in calibration mode all the time, although you can explicitly disable it and specify your hand scale manually when you start the server. Note that if you are using a two-camera setup (not recommended), quick-start calibration isn't available, and you'll also need to specify the scale manually:
./nimble_server.sh -C -s YourHandScale

Normal Operation

To run any application that depends on hand tracking, you'll need to run the hand tracking server:
./nimble_server.sh

Spread out your fingers to calibrate your hands (See Figure 3).

Take a look at the quality of the tracking shown in the DebugViewer visualization. If the hand tracking looks to be of sufficient quality, try running some of the sample programs.

Arbitrary 10-Finger Tracking Mode

We have included a feature for tracking arbitrary motion of all 10-fingers. You can activate it by running the hand tracking server with the a special flag:

./nimble_server.sh --ik

Calibrate your hands and you're ready to go. A good way to look at the tracked motion from different angles is by using the HandViewer:

./hand_viewer.sh

Use Alt + the left, middle or right mouse button to rotate, pan or zoom the view.

Troubleshooting

If you have trouble setting up the system, please refer to the Troubleshooting page for a list of known issues and fixes or contact us at support@threegear.com.

Next: Writing your own applications