How to Play Online Poker with Xbox Kinect

Happy owners of the Xbox Kinect and poker enthusiasts, read the following.  This is a short tutorial that will allow you to play poker online using your Kinect. There’s some set-up you’ll need to do but for pros PCs like you it’ll be child’s play to adjust your motion controller and become the king of the green baize. Check out the following video to see how it’ll look and read on for full instructions:

Play Poker on XBox Kinect

Getting Started

The idea is to combine the movements captured by the Kinect to keystrokes on your PC and then match these strokes to online poker macros action.

The first step is to install the Kinect on your PC. For this you need to download three different softwares (OpenNI, PrimeSense NITE and FAAST 0.07).

You can find links at the end of article for all of these. Conventional procedures for unzipping and installation apply.

Now connect your Kinect to your PC via a USB cable. If your Windows system does not automatically detect the sensor, install it manually (drivers are in the platform\Windows32\driver folder).

When your sensor has been detected correctly, start the FAAST.exe program and configure it as suggested here (see detail below). We also have a list of actions you can easily program.

Once installed, you can launch the program FAAST.exe. Configure the program with the following settings:

Do not change the depth resolution of the camera, it will prevent the application from connecting to your Kinect.

For example, you can set the “smoothing factor” parameter to 0.7.

This does not matter too much as this parameter is used to control the mouse … which will not be used here!

Don’t change anything on this screen.

Disable the mouse controller.

You can keep this active controller to control the mouse with your right arm (it’s pretty cool … but sometimes very unstable).

It is on this screen that you associate movements to keystrokes. You can reuse the list of proposed by copying the open field moves.

• left_arm_forwards has 23 key_press a
• right_arm_out 15 key_press f
• right_arm_up 12 key_hold r
• right_foot_up 6 key_press  h 
• left_arm_out 10 key_press c

To create your own movements, observe the following formula:

[part of corps_direction] [range of motion] [action] [key or button to press]

Once your Kinect is interfaced with your PC, you must associate the keystrokes controlled movements with your set buttons for your online poker software.

To do this, use macros that activate mouse clicks. Any program of creating macros can do the trick.

For those who know a little about poker software, even though TableNinja seems most suitable it only works with the Full Tilt and PokerStars software, which will be of no interest to many of you.

For those who play with another poker site online we will have to use a generic macro program … which you can find online, don’t worry! The most sensible choice is EZ Macros but unfortunately it is not free (you still get a free month trial which should be enough to test and approve or disapprove …!).

Start your program to create macros and download your online poker software. It will create as many macros as there are types of support displayed on the poker software buttons.

You must ensure that these macros are activated by a key on the keyboard: one that has been programmed to be detected by your Kinect.

In EZ Macros movement, simply choose “(add)” and follow the instructions. You obviously do the same for each of the movements that you want to use.

Small note: Macros work with “absolute” coordinates, which means that if you size your window for online poker differently the buttons are no longer in the same place on the screen … your clicks will fall next to the buttons!

To prevent this from happening it is advisable to do the configuration with the maximum window size for the poker software.

Almost There!

Once you have finished defining your macros, run the FAAST application, log in and start the emulation.

Open the online poker software and go around with a green cloth. Move outside your sensor until you see your body in the FAAST display.

All that’s left is to perform the calibration. To do this, raise your arms as if you had just said “Hands up!”

If red lines are superimposed on your body, you’re ready to play.

If the whole procedure went well, your FAAST screen should look like so:

And now you’re ready to play poker online with your Xbox Kinect … Good luck and have fun!