Hello evvvverybody, I hope the holidays have treated you all well and this message finds you rested.
Now, have you got a minute to talk about skeletons?
As you may or may not be aware of, there are a plethora of skeleton detection and tracking tools, devices and API’s out there: Kinect (v1, v2 and Azure), Nuitrack, Perception Neuron, Orbbec, ARKit, OpenPose, RealSense, the list goes on… Sadly however, literally none of these technologies is compatible with each other and everything from how many bones a skeleton has, to what each bone is called, to where they are in the body (just to name a few) differ from one API or device to the next.
In the end however the ideas, the scenarios in which we use these tools, and the functionality they provide share a lot of common ground, and if you have worked with more than one of these, it becomes clear quickly that having a standarized approach to skeletons does not only sound like a good idea, but should also be relatively achievable.
Knowing these things, and having worked with multiple of the available tools and plattforms out there, some members of the community started dreaming about a universal solution, some clean, well designed approach to make working with skeletons coming from different sources easy, intuitive and universal (restrictions apply). Some sort of Universal Skeleton Bible based on which all our beloved VL wrappers could be designed in order to make them compatible and interchangeable.
Since this is a rather large endeavor and it will have an impact on the general community, it makes sense for all of us, or at least those who are interested and work with these tools, to have a conversation and try to decide how to go forward in a way that benefits the most of us and covers the broad generality of usecases we have in our projects.
So, let’s gather and kickstart this effort, zoom, skype, jitsi, let’s work it out.
For this first meeting the general topics to go over will be (in no definitive order and open to change):
- understanding why we need/want this generalization (what are the pros and cons)
- what do we want to generalize: what is a skeleton and in which context it gets used
- trying to think of an architecture that is flexible enough to be extended for specific needs (scenarios/devices/…)
- imagine the wrapping layer for every device, made on top of this base architecture
The initial propopsition is to get together next Tuesday, Wednesday 13 2021, at 16:00 or 18:00 CET.
Two relpies below will have each time and date, please like the one that suits you best. We will decide the final time at the end of this Friday based on your votes/likes.
Also feel free to add any ideas or comments below.
Cheers and see you soon!