Seems that even more so than when the Wii launched the hacking and research communities are doing a lot of very neat things with the Kinect.
Controlling a robot with Kinect.
Applied to image scanners for sugeons
Sign language recognition
Kinect used for 3d navigationg
Roomba http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gp3E7IwLRQ
quadrocopter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWmVrfjDCyw
Optic Camo effect
Lots more tracked at
http://kinecthacks.net/
Wow, of all the times I’ve been “Wow”'d by these kinect hacks, I think this is the one that will finally convince me to hook up my innocent expensive toy to computer, and then inflict scads of alpha drivers and enthusiast homebrew software onto my pristine machine.
On second thought though, I’m not sure what it means that I’'m so excited by the prospect of mocapping dance moves for some skimpily clad anime girl…
I’m not a fan of the vocaloids myself, but I don’t judge.
Awesome.
I just think it’s funny how the guy looked all winded after like 30 seconds of dance moves.
As a zoologist, this stuff is pretty exciting. For my PhD I built a Frankenstein-like system of flashguns, controllers and still cameras to capture multi-flash images of bats flying through frame, from which I could laboriously calculate parallax differences and reconstruct flight paths in 3D space over time. This was back in 1992 and I’d have killed for a Kinect-like solution back then. I could use it now quite happily to calculate things like animal dimensions, which has some real-world practical use for me. So yeah, I think I’m going to get one and experiment.
Put that shit into the next version of Earth Defense Force and I am buying like eighteen hundred copies.
I really hope Microsoft makes all the Kinect dev stuff available to their Indie game community. I have to think we’d see all kinds of amazing things and without having to screw up our computers.
Damn you you imagine a giant monster game ala Crush, Crumble, Chomp or Rampage, where you go around destroying a 3D city, swatting down choppers with your hands, exposing powerups and health as you destroy, and generally wreaking havoc on screen? Stand still, be scanned, and turn into a giant robot or oversized reptile.
I love it. Especially the end.
They get some force feedback in there and that’d be serious money.
For those wondering about official support, Ballmer dropped word at CES that Microsoft will provide official support for Kinect: “We’ll support that in a formal way, in the right time, and when we’ve got an announcement to make, we’ll make it.”
For those wondering about whether I got to dancing around, animating a model of a japanese schoolgirl, unfortunately I did not. It seems the xbox slim bundled version of kinect only has a non-usb port, so no pc compatibility at this time?
It’s sad because I am so close to taking my kinect, my computer, my nvidia 3d capable projector, glasses, and hooking it all together so I can stare at my floor and see a 3d world like putty in my hands. Then I can indulge my fantasies of putting up the walls of a virtual houses bare avatarial hands, in augmented reality. http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2011/01/augmented-reality-for-sketchup.html
I suppose there is no kinect hack for 3d sculpting/modeling yet any how.
When watching the mocapped virtual girl I kept thinking “No real person would ever move around like that.”
Too ungraceful. :P
That’s pretty neat, and was inevitable really. I’m just surprised it happened so fast. On a related note, there’s a contest happening to implement Kinect into Minecraft gameplay wise.
Kinect With Minecraft
The details are still being hammered out, however, we felt that you guys deserved as much time as possible to start working on your submissions. We want you guys to develop a tool to allow someone to use the Kinect with Minecraft!
Once we get all the details figured out, we’ll post exactly what the prizes will be. We should have that done within the next week.
Here’s the rules.
[ul]
[li]Open to legal US Residents over the age of 18 only. (Sorry to shaft people in other countries, but this is a restriction that our lawyers have put on us!)[/li]> [li]Must work on Windows (but this does not mean it can’t work on other systems as well)[/li]> [li]Must be open source[/li]> [li]Must be able to perform the following tasks:[/li]> [li]Move, in all directions.[/li]> [li]Jump[/li]> [li]Mine (or use what ever is in your hand)[/li]> [li]Place blocks[/li]> [li]Destroy Blocks[/li]> [li]Select items from inventory[/li]> [li]Must provide a short (1-3 minute) video showing the software in action. This video will be used for promotional material, so permission to use it as such will be required.[/li]> [/ul]
Note This competition is being run by the Minecraft forum and Minecraft wiki (on behalf of Curse, Inc), it is not being ran by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft in any way. This competition is designed as a way to reward the community for creating things we’d love to see and has no bearing on the future development of Minecraft.