Microsoft Kinect - A Look at the Implications of this Amazing Device.

I've been following the recent developments in the news about the new Microsoft Xbox Kinect, and this camera strikes me as an absolutely amazing piece of hardware. The Kinect Wikipedia article is a good place to read up on what it is.

The fun part is that the Kinect has been hacked, and with its hardware free to breathe, the implications of what can be done with the Kinect are wonderful, since it is such a powerful 3D camera for relatively very little cost (retails now for $150.00).

The first hack was shown in this YouTube video: Adafruit First to Hack Kinect

This UC Davis researcher shows his hack here.

A Windows-based Kinect hack is talked about here.

This site is dedicated to open-sourcing the Kinect: www.openkinect.org

The neat thing about the Kinect is that it has a pair of infrared stereo video cameras that produce a depth-map in real time. The depth map looks similar to what Philips was using with their WOWvx A3D video standard.

If the Kinect can be hacked on a PC and you can get a real-time feed of both the Kinect's video (2D video from one camera) and also the real-time depth map which aligns with the 2D camera feed, then the possibilities are endless with amazing new 3D applications you can expirement with at very low cost. Big thanks to Microsoft for such a nice piece of equipment.

Ben Hale
Orlando Digital Media | B3N Media | Production Companies

Since the Kinect is brand new and it seems like new cool uses are coming out every day, I'll just list the newer info in links below:
(1) Interactive Puppet Prototype