Kinect games? Pah: it’s the mad Kinect hacks that make Microsoft’s motion sensor such an exciting piece of tech. Case in point: this amazing future mirror put together by the R&D team at the New York Times. Yes: the New York Times has an R&D department. Read more
We see a lot of cool Kinect hacks but not many you can easily make yourself. This one is different. Lanny Lin put together the Kinect Kung Fu Tetris hack with a combination of open source software and cheap hardware.
In the video after the break you can see Kung Fu Tetris in action with front kicks to rotate pieces, side kicks to move pieces left or right and jumps to fast drop a piece.
To create your own Kung Fu Tetris set up you just need Kinect, a PC, a TV monitor, three open source drivers and a small configuration file. Check out the video after the break then hit the link for Lanny’s step by step instructions.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the last Kinect hack that caught our eye but this one is a doozy. Tom Makin has put together an ace Kinect juggling hack that uses the camera to watch for your hands disappearing behind you back and then generates a glowing ball when they return to the camera’s field of vision.
The virtual balls in the Kinect hack can be thrown away or juggled as you can see after the break. Makin’s hack is based on another cool Kinect hack by Hogehoge335 which saw him replicating the Kamehameha attack from Dragonball Z. You can also see that Kinect hack after the jump…
It’s been a while since we saw a Kinect hack that suprised us (alright, a week or so) but this one is great: 3D Tetris!
Created by YouTube user Keysosaurus as part of his Computer Science course work at Trinity College, Dublin, it combines a Wiimote with Kinect to create augmented reality Tetris. The Wiimote rotates the pieces while you use your hands to move them around the grid. Check it out on video after the break. We want a full on Kinect Tetris game now!
Here’s a Kinect hack that could seriously perk up boring work meetings. The Kinect conference system adds gesture controls to video conferencing and some other nifty features. When people taking part in a Kinect conference speak, the system can recognise who is talking and focus the camera on them while blurring the background.
It also adds context bubbles to show the speaker’s name, documents they’re shared and how long they’ve been speaking. Gesture controls include the ability to freeze frame yourself so you appear static while the rest of the image continues to move and a gesture to make yourself disappear for privacy. You can see Kinect conference in action after the break…
We know showing you an interesting Kinect hack is almost a daily thing now but this short film made using Kinect as a motion capture tool really is charming. Torben made the story about an animation student who nearly misses his assignment deadline with the Kinect used to script the animation of a stick figure model. You can see it after the break. We think it’s a pretty impressive use of Kinect…
One of the most amazing things about the Xbox 360 Kinect is the way it has fuelled an intense burst of activity from the hacking community. These “1337” individuals have come up with some truly ingenious uses for the wand-free motion control system – including a way to hook it up to the Xbox 360’s arch rival the PS3.
But there’s more. Much more. So limber up those arms, stretch those hamstrings and read on as we’ll take you through the 10 best Kinect hacks.
