14 DAY TRIAL // Not a day goes by without coming across yet another very cool implementation of the post-hacked Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360, and that's also the case right now, with a company called Willow Garage employing the device in order to control robots via gestures.
As FastCompany reports, Willow Garage is quite a well-known name in the field of robotics, the company developing quite a few humanoid robots for research purposes over the past couple of years and focusing specifically on man-machine interfaces, including the Robotic Operating System that's apparently gaining more ground as the OS of choice among robot developers.
So, given its increased interest for the field of control solutions for robots, it should come as no surprise that they've immediately spotted the Kinect's potential, given the fact that its gesture-sensitive sensor system can be used for translating an operator's movements to a robot.
As you'll be able to see from the video embedded at the end of this article, the people over at Willow Garage seem to have managed to successfully associate movement commands issued to a robot with the gestures captured by the Kinect, which is not small feat, to be perfectly honest.
Plus, they want to take things even further by managing to get two hacked Kinect controllers to work together, thus being able to recreate a fully 3D representation of an user (covering just about all of the angles around him/her).
Quite obviously, the future possibilities enabled by this application of the Kinect are quite extraordinary, since they would practically allow people to control robots at very large distance in a very natural manner, without attaching all sorts of expensive sensors or other input devices to their bodies.
Practically, we're just beginning to see the true potential of the Kinect, and we're already starting to realize that, whether they're aware of it or not, Microsoft might have just outed a product that will literally change the world as we know it.