14 DAY TRIAL // We've talked a whole lot over the past couple of days about Microsoft's Kinect motion controller being hacked, as well as the numerous interesting applications this absolutely impressive piece of hardware enables, with the addition of some cleverly-designed homebrew software, of course, and now, it seems that the topic is back up, due to the appearance of exactly such an application.
Those of you who've read our article regarding the porting to Mac OS X of the libFreenect drivers that enable the use of the Kinect while connected to a computing system different from Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console will certainly remember Theo Watson, an intrepid developer that actually managed to carry out the Linux-Mac OS X porting process.
And now, Mr. Watson is back with a much cooler application for the Kinect hack, developed together with Emily Gobeille for Design I/O, namely tracking the silhouette of one's arm and using it to control a digital puppet (that looks just like a giant, funky bird), whose image has been displayed onto a wall with the help of a projector.
As you'll be able to see for yourselves in the video embedded at the end of the article, the result is an extremely impressive one, the high level of tracking accuracy provided by the Kinect enabling the virtual puppet to display quite a...life-like behavior, so to speak.
In fact, the Kinect will track each segment of one's hand separately (fingers, wrist, arm, etc.), then assign them to control a different part of the image being displayed.
As a future development, Mr. Watson is seriously considering adding a third dimension (depth) to the system, in order to further enhance this very interesting application.
And since this application was developed in just one day using openFrameworks and libFreenect, we're pretty sure that a bit more work will result in an even cooler future project.
Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo.