Kinect hacks are the big new thing for geeks with time on their hands. That’s all fine and good since many of the hacks we have seen lately are actually things that are interesting. A hack has surfaced today that takes the Kinect and turns it into a home automation controller.
Nitrogen’s hack uses the Kinect along with libfreenect to enable the lights in a room to be turned on or off depending on if someone is in the room. When you walk in the Kinect turns the lights on, walk out and it turns them off. It can also detect where you’re positioned in the room, and adjust which lights are turned on accordingly.
The only thing I see is that you can already do some of this with a cheap occupancy sensor, so unless you really need something else to do with your Kinect besides playing games, this hack might not be overly practical.
[via CrunchGear]
