kinect hacking

Man hacks Kinect to help his mother e-mail after stroke

It's been 12 years since Chad Ruble's mother suffered a stroke that led to aphasia, a disorder that affects language processing but not intelligence. Most of the one million Americans who have the disorder experience difficulty both reading and writing, according to the National Aphasia Association, and Chad's mother Lindy was unable to recognize text and thus unable to use a keyboard.

So Chad did what any computer-savvy son should: he hacked a Kinect to help her.

After designing a visual dashboard of emoticons (happy, sad, angry, tired, etc.), each of which can be further qualified by an amount (expressed as signal strength -- one, two, three, or four bars), Chad says he turned to a Kinect, some gesture recognition code, and the simple OpenNI library for Processing to track the position of his mother's hand. A green arrow button sends the email and a red X resets the screen.… Read more

Does Kinect for Windows warrant a new hacker bounty?

When Microsoft's mega-hit Kinect motion controller for the Xbox was released in 2010, its closed nature inspired a hefty bounty to hack it and come up with open-source drivers.

But now that Microsoft has released an official version of Kinect for Windows, the team that offered that payout is wondering whether they might have to do it again.

Microsoft eventually realized that there was an insatiable thirst for developing open-source Kinect projects and released a software development kit of its own. But now the folks at open-source hardware purveyors Adafruit are wondering if the new Kinect for Windows platform … Read more

Culture: Five predictions for 2012

Here at Geek Gestalt, every day is different. The world of geek culture is broad--sometimes bewilderingly so. A typical year's coverage can easily include stories on everything from Burning Man to Lego, aviation to 3D printing, NASA to tech startups, MythBusters to Pixar movies, and so on.

That makes coming up with predictions for next year in culture a difficult task--but we're here to serve, so that's just we're offering. Of course, trying to settle on just five ideas for 2012 means leaving a lot of things out.

Still, prognosticating culture's next steps meant talking … Read more

Kinect hack moves animated Web series

Whether you're one of the 10 million who bought a Kinect or one of those who mock its existence, there's no denying that Microsoft's Xbox 360 motion control device is doing more than letting players tickle digital tigers.

Using the camera and motion recognition built into the accessory, the techies at Triangle Productions are using a hacked Kinect to make a motion capture--or "mo-cap"--movie. They're utilizing the professional animation programs Maya and MotionBuilder, open-source programming software OpenNI, and a Kinect tool called Brekel, to capture their own actions, which characters then mimic in "Under the HUD," a new animated Web series.

In the process, they've probably saved themselves from spending sleepless nights animating frames while creating what looks to my eyes to be high production value--at what's most likely a fraction of the cost.

While the Web series hasn't aired yet (the creators are aiming for an early-May release), the sneak-peek video below details the production process, as well as the mo-cap capabilities of Kinect.… Read more

Kinect developer claims credit for hack bounty idea

Just after Microsoft announced a Windows software development kit for its hit Kinect motion controller today, a former "core" member of the device's development team said the idea for a bounty contest to hack the Kinect was his.

In a post on his personal blog, former Kinect team "core contributor" Johnny Lee said that he was happy to see news of the new SDK from Microsoft and that it was something he'd been promoting internally before he left in January to join Google as a "rapid evaluator." In the post, Lee also … Read more

Hacking Kinect: Setting sci-fi in motion

In the two-plus months since the creation of open-source drivers for Microsoft's Kinect made it possible to hack the popular motion controller, the device has been used as a sophisticated piano, to add voice control to popular video games, to create 3D renderings of a car's path, and even for a demo of soft-core porn.

Indeed, the open-source tools have snatched control of the device from Microsoft's proprietary hands, and each new day sees the emergence of some new kind of Kinect hack. But as the community of techies investing time in these types of imaginative--and unauthorized--works … Read more

Kinect hack lets you see your own skeleton

Fortunately for the guy at right, the image overlaying his torso does not show his real skeleton. Else the poor dude's spine would be located a little too far left for our comfort.

The image is actually an augmented-reality 3D CT overlay from another person that's being used in tests of a Kinect hack aimed at letting viewers see their own skeletons.

Microsoft's motion- and depth-sensing Kinect is positioned next to a big screen. When viewers stand (or dance or sway) in front of the system, it acts like a "magic mirror" that displays a virtual X-ray window in real time.

Researchers in the Technical University of Munich's Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality group developed the prototype system using OpenNI and PrimeSense NITE applications. The researchers currently envision the setup as a tool for teaching anatomy rather than an alternative to real-time CT scans (though with some refining, that could come too). … Read more