Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Updated: MS deny plans to release Kinect beyond the 360 – see below.

Yesterday we told you news of Kinect being used to play RUSE. Today: World Of Warcraft. With the 360 peripheral being realised far more excitingly as a piece of PC equipment, can it be long before Microsoft decides to change their uncharacteristic toleration of all this hackery into something legitimate? This latest hack is by the University of Southern California, as Wired tells us, building the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit piece of middleware to allow them to play the one MMO to rule them all by waving their arms around. There’s an actual real-life video of it below.

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Well, dancing about is all very well, but the only real application we were ever going to be interested in was one involving terrain. Here’s a chap from touchscreen clevertypes Evoluce who has set up Microsoft’s Silent Robot Eye Of Judgment Kinect thing being to be used in playing a real-time strategy, via VG247. Seems to work. In truth, though, motion control is only really going to fly with me if it can detect my slumped form in an armchair, and enable the ordering millions of tiny men to their deaths with a barely-perceptible nod. Then, and only then, will I install a sinister black camera to watch over me.
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I’ve decided that I’m going to keep posting videos of Kinect hacks for as long as it takes Microsoft to publish a completely awesome game for their little motorised Eye of Sauron. I appreciate that this may be some time, but I’ve got a two litre carton of orange juice here. No danger.

Today, you can watch a man wielding a sword made entirely of light. It looks pretty cool, and even makes a sort of warbling noise.
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Last week, open source hardware company Adafruit announced a $3,000 bounty for the first individual or group to hack Kinect, Microsoft’s hands-free controller extra for the Xbox 360. Kinect contains a depth sensor, RGB camera, multi-array microphones and a motorised pivot, so it can track you around a room.

Yesterday, Slashdot reported that Adafruit reported that they HAVE A WINNER! Some very “hacky” open source Kinect drivers were released by a guy called Hector a meagre 3 hours after the European Kinect launch, and can be acquired here if you’re technically minded. Hector says he intends to invest the $3,000 bounty into further hacking. Isn’t that sweet? Watch Hector’s video of Kinect running on a PC below.
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