Tag: Kinect

Another day, another Kinect hack. This particular hack is quite cool, mapping the body movements of a human onto the joints of a humanoid robot.

When it comes to playing video games, I head for the PC anytime it’s a shooter. I like driving and racing games on consoles, but other genres are PC or GTFO for me. One geek has taken his PC and Call of Duty, and then hacked up a system that uses the Kinect, the Wii Remote and Nunchuk to control the game.

When I first saw the Kinect demo for Forza I was extremely turned off. But almost every day, hackers are revealing the true potential of Microsoft’s device. You see, I think the greatest thing about the Kinect isn’t that it lets you control games with movements or gestures.

We can always rely on the guys at CTA Digital to show up at CES with some goofy add-on for gaming consoles. This year is no different, and they’re showing a variety of silly business. My personal favorite (next to these inflatable karts for Mario Kart) is their bowling ball add-on for the various motion-controlled games out there.

How’d you like to be able to see your insides courtesy of your Microsoft Kinect. Sorry, you can’t. But thanks to this hack, you might be able to use the Kinect to see a virtual model of your guts using the Xbox 360’s wonder-gadget.

With all of our video game systems moving to controls that don’t use your standard game pads, and instead use motion and gestures to control games, it’s clear that gesture control is coming to everything. I have an alarm clock that uses gesture control; you can wave your hand over the thing to silence the alarm.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 add-on has been a hit not just with gamers but with modders and hackers as well. While only a few of its launch games are truly unique and imaginative – Dance Central and Kinectimals come to mind – more and more people are discovering a variety of non-gaming related purposes for Kinect, from rendering a person invisible to controlling drones.

Well, it was only a matter of time before we’d start to see some serious motion-capture done using Microsoft’s Kinect. This incredible choreography demo by Higuchuu shows off the precision with which individual dance moves can be recorded from a subject standing in front of a Kinect camera, then played back onto a 3D avatar.

I can’t figure out what the obsession is with companies dipping gadgets in tacky crystals. Maybe it’s so bloggers like me will write about them. Damn. I’m just perpetuating the madness. I’m part of the problem, not the solution.

Engineers from MIT CSAIL have figured out out how to get the Xbox 360 Kinect to not just sense larger body movements, but to actually detect individual fingertips in mid-air.

Thanks to a little clever Kinect hacking, you can now be rendered invisible. Coder Takayuki Fukatsu figured out a way to replace his image with an invisibility cloak when viewed through the Kinect’s eyes. The way it works is by using a software hack (built with Openframeworks) to apply a copy of the background image onto the shape of his body as he moves around the room.

Kinect hacker Yankeyan is at it again. Last time, he made a lightsaber with his Kinect. This time, he’s playing Super Mario Bros. – as Mario. By taking his physical movements and converting them into running and jumping movements for Mario, he’s managed to create the first controller-free version of the game that I’ve seen.

I’ve been thinking about computer interfaces for a while, and I was pleasantly surprised that Microsoft is embracing the hacking of the Kinect, instead of shunning it. The latest hack includes using the Kinect as an interface for your computer.

Hacks of the Microsoft Kinect are just flooding in now that the device is in the hands of geeks everywhere. I bet Microsoft never thought people would be using the Kinect for anything other than gaming as it was intended.

It seems as if the hacking possibilities for the Xbox 360 Kinect just keep expanding. Today’s hack? How about a way to map your body into a real-time 3D image, then distort it.

The hacking possibilities for the Xbox 360 Kinect peripheral seem to keep growing every day. The latest hack to hit the inter-pipes: the Kinect lightsaber. Yankeyan used the OpenKinect drivers, along with image processing, tracking and rendering by OpenCV to create this great real-time lightsaber effect on his PC.