kinect

Microsoft's been busy today promoting non-gaming uses for its Kinect motion-sensing controller. The folks at the software giant's developer division have come up with one that isn't sanctioned by the company: murder.

Channel 9, the Microsoft group that evangelizes its products to developers, posted its annual Halloween video over the weekend, one of the most anticipated offerings from a unit that mostly produces technical how-to programs. This year's effort is a blood-spattering short titled, Kinect to Kill.

An homage to slasher films, Kinect to Kill shows workers at an unnamed company that looks a lot like … Read more

Microsoft is finally opening up its Kinect motion-gaming peripheral for commercial, third-party applications.

The software giant said today that starting in early 2012, any company will be able to access a Kinect software development kit (SDK) that will let them create commercial applications for Windows. Already, 200 companies, including Toyota and Razorfish, are taking advantage of Microsoft's commercial SDK as part of a pilot program.

Microsoft did not announce an exact release date for its commercial SDK.

A commercial SDK is a long time coming for companies that have been hoping to take advantage of Kinect on PCs. Currently, … Read more

Google TV uncovers an update, something is sucking the life from the iPhone 4S, and evil robots cannot be stopped by Captcha...or at least some of them.

Links from Monday's spook-tacular episode of Loaded:

Streaming video has exploded in the home theater.

Only a few years ago there was only Netflix, but now Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus, and Vudu all offer top-notch streaming video services. The variety is great, but it forces streaming video fans to keep a mental catalog of where their favorite shows and movies are available. When I rereviewed the Apple TV, I almost rented "The Trip" for $5 before I realized it was available for free on Netflix.… Read more

Popular Mechanics magazine on Monday unveiled its seventh-annual Breakthrough Awards winners, calling out 10 products and 11 innovators its editors feel are tackling longstanding problems in medicine, space exploration, technology, environmental engineering, and automotive design, in all-new ways.

Leading the list of this year's winners is "Avatar" director James Cameron, to whom the magazine gave its 2011 Breakthrough Leadership award.

The products honored by the editors include a hot new smartphone, an all-new kind of seat belt, a genre-shattering video game, highly efficient solar cells, smog-eating roof tiles, a new kind of LED lightbulb, and an automatic … Read more

After the alliterative disaster that was five-deal Wednesday, I couldn't let Friday go without correcting that disturbance in the Force. Plus, a lot of really good deals appeared on my radar today.

Many of them are today-only and/or limited-time, but all of them are still available and in stock as I write this. In no particular order:

1. Newegg has the 32GB iPod Touch (4th gen) for $269.99 shipped when you apply coupon code EMCKAHG29 at checkout. To clarify, this is the latest model, the one with the retina display and built-in cameras. And it'… Read more

Admit it. There have been times when you've wanted to drop-kick your phone into the next county. But would it be satisfying to use kicking gestures to control your phone? An experimental interface lets you do just that. The idea is to provide an alternative input method when your hands are occupied.

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and the University of Manitoba in Canada are developing a smartphone interface that lets you kick to flick, zoom, and navigate menus. The researchers used an Xbox Kinect and tablet to simulate the interface and studied how people do with the kick gesture. A working version would use your phone's camera.

The researchers found that people can reliably kick in five directions and at two velocities, which provides enough variety for useful phone control. (See the video below.)

This could be the first smartphone interface that presents a non-negligible risk of getting you arrested. Kick someone on the sidewalk, and I'm guessing the smartphone-gesture-interface defense isn't going to get you very far with the assault charge.… Read more

We've written about mirrors that tell us more than whether we have a piece of spinach stuck between our teeth. A year ago, a Harvard-MIT student showed off a mirror that's able to read certain vital signs.

Now The New York Times Research & Development Lab is taking things a step further--bringing body tracking, shopping, news, and of course advertising to one's most intimate of places: the bathroom.

The group's "magic mirror" uses LCD and Kinect technology (it's really more of a computer with a reflective surface) that lets users browse the Web while brushing their teeth.

How is this better than using a smartphone in the bathroom? For one, it's hands-free. In fact, in the group's demo, one of the designers simply places a box of meds on the mirror's small ledge; it uses RFID tagging to recognize the type of meds and pull up information about dosages and where to buy more.… Read more

Imagine if you could cut and paste information among your smartphone, tablet, smart table, and big screen. Better yet, what if you could flick objects from one device to another?

Software developer Nsquared has tied together a Windows Phone 7, Slate tablet, Microsoft Surface smart table, and Kinect-controlled big screen into one seamless computing experience. The video says it all (see below).

There are some nifty moments: Put your smartphone down on a Surface--a horizontal touch-screen display that doubles as a table--and the e-mail on the phone screen automatically shows up on the smart table beside the phone, larger. No need to do anything but put the phone down.

Here's another nifty moment: Look at a 3D model of a home on a large projected screen, choose replacement door handles using a separate application on your tablet, then flick them onto the big screen where they're rendered and incorporated into the model. Then grab another door handle from a Silverlight-enabled Web site and likewise flick it into the model. And for the piece de resistance, take a picture of a lamp with the tablet, crop the lamp from the background, and flick it into the model on the big screen.… Read more