Kinect in the kitchen: testing depth camera interactions in practical home environments

Depth cameras have become a fixture of millions of living rooms thanks to the Microsoft Kinect. Yet to be seen is whether they can succeed as widely in other areas of the home. This research takes the Kinect into real-life kitchens, where touchless gestural control could be a boon for messy hands, but where commands are interspersed with the movements of cooking. We implement a recipe navigator, timer and music player and, experimentally, allow users to change the control scheme at runtime and navigate with other limbs when their hands are full. We tested our system with five subjects who baked a cookie recipe in their own kitchens, and found that placing the Kinect was simple and that subjects felt successful. However, testing in real kitchens underscored the challenge of preventing accidental commands in tasks with sporadic input.