Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the cloaking device effect used in the original Predator movie? The effect allowed the many-mouthed man-hunter from beyond the moon to cloak itself into its background. It was all the buzz of the late 1980s cinema. Now you can achieve basically that same effect with the Microsoft Kinect home gaming system.

This home-brewed digital invisibility cloak comes courtesy of Takayuki Fukatsu. According to his YouTube channel, he constructed the hack using openFrameworks, an open source C++ coding toolkit, however he holds back on the exact deets used to achieve the effect.

Making yourself invisible to the Xbox probably isn’t the most useful function in the world, but it is an impressive piece of techno-doodling. It’s also telling of how far we’ve come technologically that anyone can recreate an effect in their living room that was Hollywood state-of-the-art just 20 years ago. It’s also another example of Kinect-o-tinkering that tech-minded folk have found for Microsoft’s cool new toy.

via PopSci

Microsoft may be struggling to sell phones, but over in Xbox 360 land, things are going crazy. The Kinect controller-free controller has sold a whopping 2.5-million units in just 25 days.

The Kinect, which uses a combination of infra-red projectors and various cameras to track puny humans in their living rooms and therefrom control the on-screen action, has been a success since the pre-sale queues on launch-day, something usually seen in only the cultish world of Apple. And with the sales of Nintendo’s Wii declining after years of sold-out, hard-to-find success, it’s looking like the Kinect will be the new king of jumping-around-in-front-of-the-TV-and-looking-stupid this holiday season.

And don’t just take my word for it. Microsoft is optimistic in its press release, predicting five million units sold this Christmas, hopefully combating the festive flab with a bit of game-related exercise. Here’s a money-making tip for any speedy games developers out there: Write a Kinect-compatible game called “Guilty Gym Membership” and get it in stores for January 1st 2011, and you’ll be very rich indeed.

Xbox 360 Surpasses 2.5 Million Kinect Sensors Sold [Microsoft]

Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

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
• Kinect Running on Multiple Platforms, Looking Cool
• Gadget Lab Podcast: Xbox Kinect, Wired's Fall Test, Skyfire …

Remember when Oliver Kreylos impressed and shocked us by showing that a single Microsoft Kinect could create some remarkably stout 3D video? He’s back at it again, this time blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive. As you can see in the video after the break, Oliver is able to rotate the camera perspective and basically film himself from a new camera angle that exists somewhere in between the position of the two Kinects, and do-so in real-time. Sure, the quality leaves a lot to be desired, but still. Wow.

[Thanks, Mohammad]

Continue reading Two Kinects join forces to create better 3D video, blow our minds (video)

Two Kinects join forces to create better 3D video, blow our minds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

One lucky guy in California managed to get his hands on an Xbox 360 Elite well before the launch date of April 29th. He’s got pictures and a receipt to show this, and he’s now selling it on eBay.

How could something like this happen you’re wondering? Well, it’s pretty simple.  He purchased this item at Target.  Certain items like this don’t come on the “Target” truck, and instead, they come via special delivery with the “street date” printed in bright colors on the box. The Target employee(s) probably didn’t pay any attention to the street date, and ended up putting them on the shelves (which they can get fined for if this is the case).

Or, this guy works there, or knows someone and managed to coerce them into selling him one. I’d like to think it was an honest mistake by a Target employee who didn’t pay attention to the street date though.

On the other hand, it’s surprising that Microsoft has already made the shipments of these items.  Usually they get delivered much closer to the launch date, sometimes even a day before-hand. 

The current bid is $800, and it will be ending tomorrow. The guy paid $514.79 with tax, so no matter what, he’ll be walking away with a decent profit!

Source: DailyTech

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What, you didn’t think the Kinect open source community would just take a break for the weekend, did you? Microsoft certainly wouldn’t want that, and after seeing how much shadow puppetry warmed our hearts, we wouldn’t want it either! Thankfully, someone in this world can now track a wooden stick to emulate a lightsaber in real time, bringing one classic meme that much closer to actuality (and the promised Star Wars Kinect game not even parsec closer to release). If that’s not enough, we also have a demo made that converts hand-waving to MIDI notes — which, as creator Ben X notes, puts him one step closer to Ableton Live integration — and a pretty pretty wild visual of body dysmorphic disorder (and a chubby cat) courtesy of the powerful open source Cinder library and a Vimeo user who goes by “flight404.” If those were appetizer and two-part entree, respectively, our post-meal coffee would be a pretty sharp critique on Kinect Joy Ride — where it seems, on at least one track, you can nab a bronze trophy by staying as still as humanly possible. All the footage you seek is after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Kinect lightsaber, and other inevitable milestones for the open-source robot eye (video)

Kinect lightsaber, and other inevitable milestones for the open-source robot eye (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink technabob, Create Digital Music, Reddit  |  YouTube (1), (2), (3), Vimeo  | Email this | Comments