Hacked Microsoft Kinect Turns Into Multi-touch Controller

As we were expecting, once the fact that Microsoft's Kinect controller for the Xbox 360 was relatively easily hackable (for experienced “security researchers” that is) has become official, we've seen plenty of people coming up with all sorts of software solutions that allow users to hook this thing up to a PC, one of the latest being the possibility to turn the device into somewhat of a multi-touch controller.

Without a doubt, the basis for this hack is the open source driver released earlier this week (you can read a bit more on this topic here), but the guy who developed the new application, Florian Echtler, managed to come up with an extremely interesting implementation, one that Microsoft should actually seriously take into account for future applications, given its sheer cool factor.

So, what Mr. Echtler did was to employ the aforementioned open source driver and combine the feeds provided by Microsoft's Kinect with his own multitouch UI "TISCH" software library, that allows the usage of external motion-tracking equipment for controlling various applications (as an interesting sidenote, it would seem that Mr. Echtler also managed hack in a similar manner Nintendo's Wiimote).

As you can see from the video yourselves, the overall result is not that different from what we can see when using a multitouch table (such as Microsoft's own Surface), namely some nice photo manipulation, including rotation and pinch/zoom, using nevertheless one's entire body instead of just their fingers.

As mentioned before, this opens up the Kinect for a whole lot of possibilities, and we certainly hope that Microsoft will manage to realize the huge potential of the awesome hardware they've created, because this thing could have a lot more applications in numerous other fields (from PC gaming to....where, sky's the limit, actually), should the company from Redmond decided to officially support it.