Pigeon Sim simulates flight, using your arms as wings.

It links a Kinect via Simple-OpenNI, Processing, some GCSE trigonometry, WebSockets and CoffeeScript or a LeapMotion sensor to the Google Earth API and browser plugin.

It also introduces Spindlytext, a nice way to write in the sky with KML, which is used to display various kinds of live data.

There’s a brief write-up, with video clip, in New Scientist. It’s also in the Independent.

NCRM have also made a video which dives into the different parts of PigeonSim

Pigeon Sim has been tested on Windows 7 and Mac OS 10.7. The Google Earth plugin seems somewhat more stable and less glitchy on Windows — but this may depend on your graphics card.

• Install Simple-OpenNI, OpenNI and Processing, following the instructions provided by Simple-OpenNI. Note that on 64-bit Windows, you probably still want the 32-bit OpenNI libraries, since Processing comes with its own 32-bit Java.
• Install the p5websocket library (version 0.1.3+) for Processing.
• Launch Chrome with the --disable-web-security command-line flag (to allow cross-domain AJAX requests for the live data), and open web_client/index.html. If you don’t already have it, you’ll need to agree to install the Google Earth plugin.
• Plug in your Kinect, run the pigeonsim Processing sketch, and fly!
• Alternatively, if you don’t have a Kinect, run the pigeon_dummy sketch. Click and drag to bank/steer, and press [up] to flap, [down] to dive, and [space] to go home. This mainly defeats the point, though.

A .BAT file is included to start PigeonSim on boot, just check your own paths and username in this file. Drop it into your Startup folder located in by typing shell:startup in the Start Menu (Windows 7).

To enable LeapMotion Support append enableLeap=1 to the query string (e.g. /pigeonsim/web_client/?enableLeap=1) which will allow you to control the sim with your hand movements. See this video, for instructions and an example of how to fly with a LeapMotion.

To enable a top down map of your current position and path flown append hud=1 to the query string.

This code is released under the GPL v3. To negotiate GPL-incompatible uses, feel free contact me.