Chris Heathcote spends an evening with Kinect. Good hands-on impressions.
The Kinect Inside Story
Wired UK reports on the research and development that went into the Microsoft Kinect in their November issue. Their description of the launch event at the beginning of the article sounds completely bizarre…
Still More Kinect Hacking
Kinect hacking makes it into the NYTimes and CreativeApplications.Net has another great roundup of the week in Kinect hacking.
More Kinect Hacks
The Kinect hacks just keep on coming. Seems to me this piece of gaming hardware already triggered more playful hacking in its first 10 days on the market than the Wiimote.
First, a 3D box cloud renderer written in Processing:
Next, how to turn an entire room into a multitouch surface using the Kinect:
That last one heavily reminded me of the Microsoft LightSpace concept they demoed a few weeks back. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used some very Kinect-like hardware for that.
Open Source Kinect
CreativeApplications.Net has a great overview of open source development efforts around Microsoft Kinect. There are already libraries for openFrameworks and Processing available and there are all kinds of amazing things going on, but this is probably my favorite – a 3D video capture system:
Now i definitely have to get a Kinect. (Previously)
Kinect on Mac OS X
XBox Kinect running on OS X ( with source code ) from Theo Watson on Vimeo.
Grab the mac files here, or grab the source Kinect drivers from the libfreenect project here.
I might have to get one of these things after all.
The Problem With Kinect
When Xbox 360′s controller-free Kinect add-on hits stores later this week it has the potential to redefine gaming in ways even the Nintendo Wii hasn’t yet done. It could just as easily fall flat on its face.
While Nintendo’s motion-sensing Wii changed the way we use controllers, Microsoft’s Kinect completely removes the need to hold a controller for its Xbox 360 games. But with that potential comes some very big problems, according to experts on digital media and user interface.
Well worth a read if you’re interested in the design-side of motion gaming.
