Kinect hacks go mainstream
While there have been several unofficial modifications of the Kinect motion control hardware to date, they’ve mainly been by the type of people who use screennames and can be dismissed by mainstream onlookers (however unfairly) as weirdoes in bedrooms. That’s all changes with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology producing its own hack for the system.
The MIT Media Lab, a 25-year-old department with more than a hundred graduate students working on projects, has come up with a plug in for the Chrome browser that allows users to navigate web pages using only hand gestures.
The DepthJS plug-in includes moving the hand up and down to scroll a page, moving side to side to switch tabs, and using a grabbing motion to “click” on a link. The students have released the code for the plug-in, allowing others to modify and improve upon the system.
It does have to be said that while this is another example of technical creativity, it’s still really only proof of concept rather than a genuinely useful creation. Let’s be honest, if you’re far enough away from a screen that hand gestures are the most convenient way of interacting with websites, the chances are you’re either going to be squinting at the screen or dealing the Web pages that simply aren’t designed to appear on such a large display.
(That said, I’d certainly appreciate the ability to send e-mails to the spam folder using a middle finger gesture.)
Even though this could be seen as Kinect hacking gone legit (surely nobody is going to imply MIT students are trying to come up with a way of pirating games or producing knock-off consoles), Microsoft really shouldn’t be worried. Given it’s no secret the company is trying its best to include some form of gesture control capabilities into Windows 8, it should relax and see such projects as a wonderful way of crowdsourcing the technical possibilities and challenges that Kinect’s hardware offers.
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