Now that Kinect hardware is available for Windows, app developers can get busy bringing voice and motion control to desktop PCs. Here's my wishlist.
Bodymetrics lets you try on clothes without actually trying on clothes by leveraging the technology behind Microsoft’s $150 Kinect camera to create a precise 3D model of your body that mimics your movements as an on-screen avatar. When a particular item of clothing has been mapped in the same way, you’re able to see exactly how it would look on you in real life.
Sorry, party photographers, you’ve been replaced—by a robot. Microsoft’s new EDDIE (short for Expandable Development Discs for Innovation and Experimentation) can now roam a crowded room, focus on people’s faces and snap photos with a fancy DSLR camera.
Price drops. They can be handy. Just ask Nintendo. The company’s challenges with the just-launched 3DS have been well-documented, but their recent price drop on the handheld has spiked sales.
Child of Eden is currently my favorite Kinect game. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest masterpiece makes me feel artsy and connected and like I’m floating in the future. All good things, to be sure.
I’ll be honest with you, Techland readers: I haven’t played a Kinect game in months. Yes, motion-control titles have continued to roll out since the blockbuster launch of Microsoft’s skeletal-tracking camera but none of them, to me, offered anything to get excited about. And, yes, I mean you, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Carnival Games [...]
The one message that Microsoft drove home during their E3 2011 press conference is that they’re going to give everyone–from hardcore gamers to avid TV watchers to casual players–reason to turn on their hyper-successful motion-sensing peripheral.
Adding to Sony’s ongoing hack-attack tribulations, Microsoft’s taking a victory lap today, claiming its Xbox 360 games console outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 during the first four months of 2011.
Once again, leave it to hackers to turn something trivial and fun into something useful. A group of French hackers have repurposed a Kinect to become, as they call it, “a gesture recognition system” – in other words, something that can potentially read and translate sign language.
You know all that slightly eerie but kinda cool stuff you learned in grade school about the body’s latent electromagnetic energy field? Turns out your house generates something similar (no surprise) courtesy everything with an electrical pulse contained both within, from gizmos and gadgetry to the wiring in the walls.
This article has been cross-posted from our partner site, Technologizer.
