Fresh on the heels of its envisioned future video, Microsoft has posted an inspiring portrayal of the Kinect to YouTube. The video outlines the somewhat unexpected uses of Kinect in its one-year history, including educational and medical applications, which is likely meant to boost awareness ahead of the commercial launch of the Kinect SDK.
Developers have been hacking Kinect and creating new… → Read More
I took my six-year-old son Kasper to Microsoft’s Kinect For Kids event yesterday in hopes of better understanding Microsoft’s efforts at grabbing the younger demographic. While he’s already an avid weekend gamer, I wondered if Microsoft’s latest immersive play solutions would stir him in anyway. I discovered two things: that the Kinect for Kids initiative, as evidenced by the image above, is a… → Read More
Microsoft and Build-A-Bear (a store where children can taxidermy the flayed corpses of teddy bears killed in the wild) are working together to create Kinectimals Now With Bears, a Kinect-connected game for the 360. → Read More
Obligatory Minority Report reference. There, it’s out of the way, and we can enjoy this interesting video without worrying about when the allusion is going to drop.
The University of Lincoln in the UK is hosting an interactive exhibition in which users can navigate a number of gigapixel photos by using over-sized gestures tracked by a Kinect. Meanwhile, your experience is enhanced by ambient… → Read More
The great smartening of the idiot box continues. It was several years ago that we started seeing the first internet-connected TVs, and since then TV makers have been adding more and more slightly useful features, generally one or two per generation — it wouldn’t do to put them all out at once, of course. And while much functionality is still left to the set-top box, media player, or console… → Read More
We’ve seen hacks for the Kinect from the very start, and even some that suggested one like this might be possible: a Kinect being moved around like a camera, recording the depth of everything it sees and building up a full-3D map of the room and every object in it. They call it KinectFusion, and it’s really quite fascinating to watch.
The position of the camera is constantly tracked by… → Read More
The Kinetic Space project uses almost any type of 3D spatial scanner – including the Xbox Kinect – to register and read gestures. How does it work? Well, first you register your body and then record a set of gestures. The system can read those gestures and trigger events based on the speed and repetition of the gestures. The best part is the granularity: you can even scan hand motions for an… → Read More
And I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations. And this is my counterpart R2D2. We’ve clearly been pimped out by Master George again. It was probably R2′s fault. That malfunctioning little twirp. I told him not to sell out and let us be turned into cheap gaming accessories, but he’s faulty, malfunctioning. Kept babbling on about his mission. We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life. → Read More
Asus has been working with Kinect co-creator PrimeSense to put together a PC-based version of Microsoft’s hit depth-detecting game controller. The thought, I presume, was that PC gamers and hackers would like a native device and an open platform for gesture-based game and OS controls.
Their creation has been around for a bit, but we haven’t heard much regarding it, perhaps because it isn’t… → Read More
It’s been a while since we’ve posted any interesting Kinect hacks. They were coming fast and furious for a while, but this is the first I’ve seen in a while that really makes me happy. Robotics students at Stanford put this “JediBot” together from an articulating arm and a Kinect (and of course a little robotics know-how). The Kinect tracks the location of both “lightsabers” and has the robot make… → Read More
Last week, Microsoft filed for an interesting U.S. trademark for ‘NUADS’, describing it as:
Advertising services, namely, promoting and marketing the goods and services of others through online interactive video games by enabling consumers to interact with third-party advertising content through voice or body gestures via computer game console and sensor devices. → Read More
On stage during “The New Geography Of Gaming” panel at Web 2.0 Summit, the topic of conversation between Bing Gordon, Activision’s Robert Kotick and Microsoft’s Don Mattrick focused on how amazingly engaging today’s games. A key talking point was plastics vs. not plastics i.e controllers (or guitars in the case of Activision’s Guitar Hero) vs. the gesture and spoken command control interface of… → Read More
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