Hasta La Gadget!

Nov 12

Kinect Running on Multiple Platforms, Looking Cool

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, kinect, Microsoft, os x, Today's Chili

Spurred on by cash prizes, cool applications and the glory of getting code to work, Xbox Kinect hackers have opened up the camera and have it running on full throttle. Here’s a short list of what’s been done in just one week.

Hector Martin was the first to post open-source drivers to Github and a proof-of-concept video, winning $3000 for himself and $2000 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of Adafruit’s Open Kinect contest.
Google software engineer Matt Cutts sponsored another $2000 contest for people who used the newly-found open-source drivers to run a cool application. Because apparently, numeric depth sensor output isn’t very cool. Cutts proposed some potential projects, the first being “A Minority Report-style user interface where you can open, move, and close windows with your movements.”
Within a day, a user with the handle Flomuc adapted Hector’s code to use multitouch-style pinch-and-spread gestures to manipulate photos with Kinect running on Ubuntu Linux.
Meanwhile Theo Watson was likewise able to port the now rapidly-developing open-source drivers to run Kinect on Mac OS X.

Pretty cool, if you’re into this sort of thing. Me, I’m holding out for someone to beat Matt Cutts’s second challenge to hackers:

What if you move the Kinect around or mount it to something that moves? The Kinect has an accelerometer plus depth sensing plus video. That might be enough to reconstruct the position and pose of the Kinect as you move it around. As a side benefit, you might end up reconstructing a 3D model of your surroundings as a byproduct.

To paraphrase The Social Network, Kinect on a MacBook just isn’t that cool. You know what’s cool?

Kinect on a robot. Controlled by a junior high student. That’s what this is about.

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