Tag: Kinect

When Microsoft decides to do a custom car, you can bet it’s going to be packed with all sorts of technology. Microsoft teamed up with custom car modders West Coast Customs on the design and dubbed the car Project Detroit.

What if you could play with your Etch-a-Sketch by simply moving your hands in the air? That would be pretty awesome. What once might have seemed like magic is now a reality. The Kinect-a-Sketch merges Etch-a-Sketch technology with gesture recognition.

Trying on clothes in stores is a pain. For you and the store, since about 40% of clothing purchases are returned because they don’t fit right. Kinect to the rescue. The Kinect now officially does everything.

The evidence that Japan is working on making giant robots real continues to pile up. Naoki Maru is known in Japan for his King Kizer series of robots, has developed a motion-controlled version that he calls Real King Kizer.

Well, now we have some more footage from Star Wars Kinect. When we first took a look at this game I jokingly said that I might have to buy it because it features Slave Leia dancing in Jabba’s palace.

Geeks have been doing all sorts of wild things with Microsoft Kinect sensor since Microsoft launched it. The Kinect for Windows sensor hasn’t been around as long as the original gaming sensor, but it already has one of the most awesome uses I’ve ever seen for anything Microsoft manufactured.

I wasn’t going to buy this game, but now it turns out that there is at least one very good reason why I should. Apparently, the Star Wars Kinect game will feature Slave Leia in some sort of weird dance-off in Jabba’s palace.

The Microsoft Kinect has been used for all sorts of interesting interactive experiments and artworks since it first came on the scene. It’s clear that these alternative uses for the motion sensing technology are often more compelling than the games themselves.

Most independent projects that use the Kinect are not related to video games, so I was thrilled when I read about Theo Watson, who was able to make a Kinect game in just 3 hours. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure no publisher in his right mind will release it, because Watson’s game is virtual Russian Roulette.

The Kinect was designed to make it easier for us to command software, but the guys at Chaotic Moon Labs knew they could make it move actual objects. The result? The Board of Awesomeness, a motorized longboard that relies on video recognition, speech recognition, gesture recognition, location data, accelerometer data and more to make it move.

The inverse proportion of awesome Kinect hacks to decent Kinect games continues. Software engineer Taylor Veltrop used a combination of store-bought items and his non-store-bought brain to come up with a robot that mimics his movements sends video back to him in real-time.

Everybody is playing Skyrim, but not the way that YouTube user KinectFAAST is playing. He has unveiled a new Skyrim hack that allows players to use Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller with the game. All you have to do is watch the video to see how great this hack is.

With its Siri personal virtual assistant technology in the iPhone 5, Apple has proven that we’re willing to converse with our technology – assuming it has more of a personality than your average “say one for tech support” voice recognition system.

Owners of the iPhone 4S have their own virtual assistant in the form of the helpful and mostly respectful Siri. But if Corey Thomas gets his way, all PC users can have their own voice-activated virtual assistant too.

The guys over at XCM can’t stop modding stuff. They started out offering colorful illuminated casemods for video game consoles, then for their controllers, and now, they’re even offering a light-up mod for the Xbox 360 Kinect.

Great minds do think alike. I’m sure some of you still remember the Sixthsense wearable computer by Patti Maes and Pranav Mistry. Here’s an very similar concept device that uses different hardware to arrive at the same functionality.