Hasta La Gadget!

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.

See Also:

• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
• How Facial Recognition Works in Xbox Kinect
• Kinect Teardown Reveals IR Projector, Fan
• Kinect Not Colorblind, Some Testers Find
• $2000 Bounty Put on Open-Source Kinect Drivers
• Adafruit Offers $1000 Bounty for Open-Source Kinect Drivers …
• Kinect Hacker Won't Share, Even for Money

We gotta say, the last time we were this excited about hardware hacking For The Greater Good was when people started using the Wiimote for all sorts of awesome projects. Kinect is naturally a lot more complicated, but there’s also a lot of potential here, and we can’t wait to see what people come up with. Florian Echtler took that open source driver and hooked the Kinect into his own multitouch UI “TISCH” software library (which actually supports the Wiimote as an input already, funny enough). The result is a bit of MS Surface-style multitouch picture shuffling and zooming, but it uses full body tracking instead of touchscreen input, of course. The self-effacing Florian had this to say in the video description: “I thought I’d get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done so it’s out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things.” You’re still a hero in our book, man. Always a hero.

Feeling left out on all these Kinect shenanigans because you’re rocking a Mac? Well, libfreenect has also now been ported over to OS X by Theo Watson (who sounds unenthused about his accomplishment in the video embedded after the break). Also: once you’re done admiring your IR-rendered visage on your shiny Apple-built hardware, scrounge yourself up a working Linux box. All the cool people are doing it.

Continue reading Hacked Kinect taught to work as multitouch interface

Hacked Kinect taught to work as multitouch interface originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TUAW  |  Theo Watson (Vimeo), floemuc (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

This one’s a no-brainer, really. Microsoft had been talking up Project Natal for what seemed like forever, finally renaming the Kinect for Xbox 360 and unveiling this June at the E3 gaming show in Los Angeles.

And by most accounts, the company seems to have a genuine hit one its hands. The Kinect is shaping up to be one of the most hotly requested items this holiday season and just the kick in the pants the Xbox 360 needed to stay fresh into 2011.

The Kinect ships at $149.99 as a standalone device–pricier than the $99 PlayStation Move, sure, but the hands-free motion controller will almost certainly make the day of someone on your shopping list.

The controller is a terrific option for those younger kids on your list for whom much of the Xbox’s library is a bit too mature. Games like Dance Central, Kinectimals, and Kinect Sports are all-ages affairs that have the added benefit of getting players up off of the couch.

“We are preparing ourselves for brisk demand for the Kinect, especially with Christmas present-buying now on most people’s minds,” an executive from Best Buy UK told the The Telegraph. “Availability is very limited and on a first-come, first-served basis, but we expect deliveries between now and Christmas.”

It still seems a bit early to suggest that the device will sell out entirely in the big box retailer, in spite of The Guardian’s grandiose suggestions. Still, between this and solid Window Phone 7 UK sales, it’s shaping up to be a good holiday for Microsoft in that country.

Over the weekend, a member of the NUI Group hacked the new Xbox Kinect to run on Windows 7, posting proof-of-concept videos, but not the code.

“As a research project, I took a weekend challenge of getting this awesome new Xbox Kinect device to work on Windows,” writes Alex P, who previously hacked the PS3 Eye camera to run on Windows. “Here are the first tests of controlling the Kinect NUI Motor and reading the Accelerometer data from a PC. Outlook looks good for other sensors (ie cameras and microphones) of the device.”

A day later, he posted the following video of the Windows-controlled Kinect with on-screen output from its depth and color sensors:

Open-source hardware company Adafruit has offered a bounty for open-source Kinect drivers, upping the reward to $2000 after Microsoft threatened legal action against anyone opening up their peripheral.

Engadget reports that Alex P isn’t interested in the reward, preferring to use it with Code Laboratories’s $150 video suite CL Studio Live.

DIYers, robots and children all hoping to leverage the Kinect for educational use did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

See Also:

• Adafruit Offers $1000 Bounty for Open-Source Kinect Drivers …
• $2000 Bounty Put on Open-Source Kinect Drivers
• How Facial Recognition Works in Xbox Kinect
• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect