Move around in your favorite MMO with Kinect

Isn't the Xbox Kinect only for crazy dancing games? No one would ever use that to play a real game like World of Warcraft, right? Well, the researchers at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC have put an end to that notion. The university engineers have created a Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit or FAAST that associates keyboard events with body movements. This gives the Kinect device a new, wider range of possibilities because it can now be utilized on a standard PC. As Skip Rizzo of the Institute explains in a video presentation, "This opens up the doorway for building rehabilitation exercises after a stroke or traumatic brain injury and in a area that's getting a lot of attention: the area of childhood obesity and diabetes. This is a major area that people in the United States need to develop new ways to get kids up and moving around."

Now instead of sitting around for six hours fighting the Horde, you can get up out of your seat and punch an orc in the face. Although the technology is just in its infancy, it is still very possible to play your favorite MMO games with your body movements. Check out the video after the break to see all the (literal) action, then head to ICT's site to see more.