14 DAY TRIAL // After Microsoft's Kinect motion controller was hacked last week, the drivers required for connecting the device to a computer running Linux, Windows or Mac OS X being already freely available online, we were sort of expecting all sorts of interesting applications for this very promising (hardware-wise) product to start appearing as well.
And sure enough, that's exactly what's happening as we speak, with more and more applications making their way online, the latest we've come across belonging to UC Davis visualization researcher Oliver Kreylos, who has actually managed to transform the Kinect into something extremely useful, namely a 3D camera.
The researcher's goal was not only to use the Kinect's two cameras in order to capture objects in three dimensions, but also to actually re-create in a 3D environment their original orientation and size.
Mr. Kreylos used his own 3D reconstruction code, coupled with the Vrui VR toolkit for 3D rendering management and interaction (another of the researcher's own developments), but admits to having employed some of the reverse engineering work of Hector Martin, the creator of the original Kinect open-source drivers for Linux, in order to connect the controller to a PC.
As you can see from the video below, the results are actually pretty good, the Kinect managing to deliver, with the help of the aforementioned software applications, a live “3D reconstruction” video feed, that's actually very accurate, as far as the positioning and size of objects is concerned.
Mr. Kreylos has some pretty big plans for his solution, the next step being to actually combine real and computer-generated imagery into a single feed, practically turning the Kinect into a tool for creating an augmented reality environment.
Once again, all we can say is that we really hope Microsoft's paying attention to all of this, since we're pretty sure that they could take a cue (or two) from all of these enthusiasts as far as enhancing the Kinect's range of applications is concerned.