I love this
Don’t you love things like this? It combines so many things that really interest me: individual users hacking proprietary software/hardware, augmented reality, and real-time 3-d visualization.
The story is that last week or so, Microsoft released Kinect, which is essentially a controller for its X-box console that takes as input the user’s physical position and movements. It uses a RGB camera coupled with two “depth sensors” (which essentially are cameras that aren’t interested in color as much as position and parallax) to create and interpret a 3-d image. Of course, the intention is for this to be used by X-Box games made or approved of by Microsoft. But once the hardware has been built and nicely compartmentalized, it’s only a matter of time before people hack it and learn how to use the sensor’s input for their own programs.
We’ve seen this before. When the Wii came out with similar technology, it was hacked by many, as described in this Ted Talk . And my favorite instance of videogame systems being hacked is when a research group hooked together 16 Playstation 3’s to preform parallel black hole simulations: PS3
I’m very excited to see what else can come from this sort of technology. The obvious next step would be to combine two or more of these Kinect devices to get a more complete 3-d image. I don’t know about you, but I think this stuff is really cool.