News Tagged: Hacks
News: Cool Hack: How To Possess A Horse
(With Kinect, obviously.)
Jiawen Chen and the team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, have been playing with the idea of possessing objects. Not buying them, you understand, but taking them over and turning them into living, breathing characters. Their new software asks the user to place a 3D object in front of the Kinect camera - like a.. Continue Reading »
News: Masters Project Shows How Hybrid Games Should Work
Impressive stuff
No matter how successful Kinect becomes, there'll always be a part of us that yearns for an analogue stick and buttons to make the experience better. That's exactly what hybrid games like Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor are promising, but how long until we see a first-person shooter using hybrid controls, and what would it be like? Talented programmer Alexander Poolton has already.. Continue Reading »
News: This Kinect Poker Video Might be Bluffing
We can't tell
Online poker combined with Kinect sounds like a rich goldmine of gameplay experiences, but the video below only gives you a slight whiff of what might be possible when the sensor is brought to the game. Rather than using Kinect's body-tracking to control a human avatar's actions, which would be infinitely useful over the Internet — though potentially very dangerous — the hack.. Continue Reading »
News: Minority Report Kinect Interface Shown Off
Features finger-tracking
Last year we reported on an early Minority Report-style hack for Kinect, and the idea persists as Evoluce recently presented its own take on the interface at the RTT Excite conference. The hack uses finger-tracking to manipulate icons, images and videos, lending itself to desktop computing as well as preventing murders yet to happen with the help of three psychically-gifted.. Continue Reading »
News: This Portal 2 Kinect Hack Is Not a Lie
Though it's not exactly practical either
While Kinect's capable of lots of things, from turning you into a superhero, to helping the blind see, but forget all that: it also plays Portal 2. Brad Cooley used the FAAST toolkit to get the game up-and-running with Kinect and although it's in need of a few tweaks, it's still an impressive show of what's possible using Kinect. Continue Reading »
News: Kinect Navigates the Universe and Helps the Blind to See
Next step: sentience
The Kinect SDK is due this spring, and judging by what Microsoft's research arm has already achieved with the device, the world of Kinect hacks is about to get a lot more interesting. The video below shows Kinect used in all kinds of useful ways, including alerting the visually-impaired to potential dangers, helping wheelchair users to navigate and assisting in the navigation.. Continue Reading »
News: Kinect Makes Gmail Motion April Fool's Joke into Reality
Of course
You may have seen Google's Gmail Motion April Fool's joke this year, which promised to get rid of the mouse and keyboard for email and implement a new system based entirely on body movements. As jokes go it wasn't bad, but the team at ICT MxR made it into a reality using Kinect. The same University of Southern California team that brought the sensor to Azeroth with World of Warcraft for.. Continue Reading »
News: Kinect Now Works on PlayStation 3, Plays Killzone to Boot
Kinect's first FPS
Kinect works on all Xbox 360 consoles. Kinect also works on Windows PCs thanks to open source drivers. However, Kinect now also works on home console opponent PlayStation 3, thanks again to committed coders. Shantanu Goel has worked up a proof of concept showing the sensor working on PlayStation 3 to scroll through the console's XrossMediaBar interface, selecting icons and even.. Continue Reading »
News: Forget Kinect Sports Boxing, Kinect Punch-Out!! is the New Champion
One hit KO
We already know it's possible to play Super Mario Bros. on Kinect, but what about something a bit more suited to the sensor's purpose? While Rare did an admirable job of translating the sweet science in its Kinect Sports boxing mode, coder Dan Dockery has brought classic NES fighter Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (also known as Punch-Out!! featuring Mr Dream due to licensing issues) to.. Continue Reading »
News: Forget Robots, Kinect's Purpose is to Play Angry Birds
Sensor proves its worth
So Kinect can control robots, Japanese superheroes and World of Warcraft characters, but even those three worldwide fantasies pale in comparison to this next Kinect hack: Angry Birds. The App Store phenomenon is now on PC, making it the perfect candidate for an unofficial Kinect makeover. It's not all hands-free though, Continue Reading »
News: Gesture-Based Head-Tracking Tetris a Great Mash of Old and New
Weird, though
The other day we showed you a video of Kinect headtracking that could make 3D gaming possible without 3DTVs, and now we have one of the first videos of that technology being put to good use in time-honoured fashion: with a game of Tetris. Taking a top-down perspective not unlike Welltris, you can manipulate the blocks with gestures, sending them flying towards the bottom with a flick.. Continue Reading »
News: It's 2054 and Minority Report's Interface is Now Operational
Next stop: jetpacks
This isn't the first Minority Report-style interface created with Kinect, and we'll wager a large sum of money on it being far from last, but it is one of the best efforts we've seen so far. Created by MIT students, the hack shows off some of the interface's more complex features including grabbing, rotating and trashing objects with specific gestures, with the sensor even.. Continue Reading »
News: Make Your Christmas Lights a Little More Interactive with Kinect
Beats the clapper any day
It must be admitted that this is hardly the most practical of uses for Kinect, but it's more about spreading festive cheer than a huge leap forward in mankind's scientific understanding. The hack below uses the OpenKinect software to interact with light-dimming hardware to produce a beautiful light show when connected to these custom LED arrays. You can turn them on or off.. Continue Reading »
