Kinect swipes start/stop

Hi,
I’m still really new to Touch, but I’m trying to create a project using a Kinect where a user can make a ‘swipe’ (left to right or vice versa motion) with their arm and have it affect the rotation of an object.

I have a semi working set up right now based off the one Mary Franck uses in her FXPHD Intro to TD course ( fxphd.com/details/439/ ).

The problem I have is that if I swipe my arm to the side, it causes the cube to spin, but putting my arm back to normal rest position rotates the cube back towards where it was. Ideally, at the end of the swipe, the cube would keep the rotation until another swipe is made. I’m not really sure how to create a start/end point with only the Kinect. Mary’s set up used a mouse click to control the start/stop point.

The best I can think of is lifting the left arm above a certain range enables rotation controlled by the right arm, but I’m not sure that’s the most intuitive of solutions.

Does anyone have a suggestion of how I might be able to do this?

Have the swipe only work when the arm is at a certain height?

i thought about that, but that only works if the arm will drop each time after a swipe.
if i’m manually moving or rotating something (right to left for example), i dont necessarily drop my arm each time, i might just move it back to the right to start moving it again.

this isn’t the best example, but it kind of shows what i mean. in this short video, ( istockphoto.com/video/womans … 5-35343280 ) the woman’s hands don’t drop, they lift a little to reach for the next hanger to pull, but stay pretty close in total height in the Y direction. this is similar to how i would feel about trying to rotate a cube or globe.

it might be a condition i can’t avoid and i will just have to make it be active when arms are raised above Y.

The difficulty of not having hand information or a button to press… In the future, when we can tell what position people’s fingers are in, this will be so much easier!