Tag: KINECT

Google's Gmail Motion hoax might not be so far-fetched after all. A group of post-doc students at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies has turned Google's April Fools' joke into reality, using their software engineering skills and Microsoft Kinect motion sensors. They even incorporated the same ridiculous gestures that Google demonstrated in its prank video. ...

Two of the most popular toys amongst DIY enthusiasts right now are the Arduino and the Microsoft Kinect. So what happens when you combine them? Probably the most impressive hack of either device we've ever seen. Created by Michael Zöllner and Stephan Huber from the University of Konstanz, NAVI (or Navigational Aids for the Visually Impaired) allows the blind to easily navigate an ...

With rescue workers continuing to search for survivors among the rubble from last week's devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of engineers from the U.K. have constructed a robot that could make their jobs a little easier -- thanks to Microsoft's Xbox Kinect. The Kinect's motion-detection sensors can instantly model the robot's surroundings and scan them for survivors, ...

Perhaps you're the type of parent that hates to see a child become ADD-addled and glassy-eyed in front of the TV. Well, thanks to 'Sesame Street' and Microsoft's motion-control Kinect gaming system, you can soon have your little tyke unresponsive and rambunctious. According to the Xbox PR folk, the multiple 'Sesame Street'-themed games encourage "dancing, jumping, flying and more." We would ...

Scientists have already discovered a variety of health benefits that video games offer to elderly gamers, including heightened mental acuity and vision restoration. After performing a 10-week observational study, Dr. Patricia Kahlbaugh of Southern Connecticut State University now believes that motion control gaming alleviates other afflictions that commonly plague senior citizens, including ...

Water levels in video games have been terrible since Mario's first attempt at swimming in level 2-2, and things haven't improved much over the years as Ecco, Link and countless others have waded into the sea. Games that approximate the sport of swimming itself, often hastily tacked onto the year's Summer Olympics package, have been universally bad, marked by mindless controls, poor animation, and ...

We've seen the Kinect do some pretty amazing tricks. It's easy to forget, though, that, despite all the hacking and bolting the gaming peripheral to robots, the Kinect is a video camera at heart. Artists Dom Jones and Dan Nixon recorded and processed the footage for a video from a band called Echo Lake using the Kinect. The results are a sublime blend of musical specters performing the song, ...

While surgical robots are much more precise than clunky human hands, the surgeons who use these devices aren't able to guide the 'bots with their natural sense of touch, and this can make it easier to bump into a delicate organ or artery. In response to this problem, some graduate engineering students at the University of Washington recently developed an Xbox 360 Kinect hack, which uses the ...

Over the weekend, Swedish police responded to a report of domestic abuse and discovered the only violence happening was of the pixelated variety. According to Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, cops stormed Robert Johansson's home after a nosy neighbor claimed to see five people inside beating up a woman. Turns out, Johansson and his friends were just playing a round of boxing on the Xbox 360's 'Kinect ...

Gamers have found a new culprit in the great battle against the red ring o' death (or RRoD, for those in the know). Some consumers have told the BBC that they blame the Kinect for the death of their consoles, many of which began failing shortly after they were connected to Microsoft's new motion controller. This isn't just a few disgruntled customers in the U.K., either; gamers around the world ...

Part of any prison guard's job involves breaking up fights or riots that invariably erupt when you put a bunch of convicts in close physical contact with each other. Defusing these spats can be a messy, and sometimes dangerous task, but it may be getting slightly easier, thanks to new computer vision systems that can automatically detect brewing violence from above. As the New York Times ...

Is it just us, or did 2010 seem like an abnormally long year? Of course, it was no longer than any other year in history. But, from a tech perspective, at least, this year saw more seismic changes and game-altering developments than any other in recent memory. From Android to Zuckerberg, 'FarmVille' to Foursquare, iPad to iPhone 4, 2010 certainly wasn't short on memorable moments. Here are 15 ...

Well, it was inevitable. The second we start augmenting reality, using our bodies as controllers, and bringing our physical spaces into video games, we are immediately going to start thinking of virtual sex. The porn industry is no slouch when it comes to getting with the technological times, but, with the Kinect and gesture-based game play, video game booty is the clear next step. So ...

The modding and hacking community is simply having a field day with Microsoft's Kinect. It was just a couple of weeks ago that we highlighted a few of the fun and impressive things that people much smarter than us were doing with the latest in motion-controlled gaming peripherals. But those innovations already look simplistic next to the crazy things being cooked up in living rooms and labs ...

The Xbox 360's Kinect motion-control system provoked comical moments of ungainly, destructive gaming immediately upon its release. Thankfully (for those with a predilection for schadenfreude), that oafish hilarity has continued at an almost exponential rate. Well, Microsoft just revealed a significant reason for the abundance of Kinect casualties, and it relates to the Kinect's market success. ...