floemuc
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Homebrewer develops PC Kinect photo app
Just a couple of days after the release of an open-source Kinect driver, coder floemuc has developed a proof-of-concept PC application for the sensor. In the video after the break, floemuc uses Kinect to track his hand movements, allowing him to manipulate and resize photos. He hasn't released the software, unfortunately. "I thought I'd get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done," he said in the YouTube description, "so it's out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things." It's nice to find out that people are thinking about using Kinect to do the cool Minority Report stuff, instead of just the gross ad-personalization bits.
Hacked Kinect taught to work as multitouch interface
We gotta say, the last time we were this excited about hardware hacking For The Greater Good was when people started using the Wiimote for all sorts of awesome projects. Kinect is naturally a lot more complicated, but there's also a lot of potential here, and we can't wait to see what people come up with. Florian Echtler took that open source driver and hooked the Kinect into his own multitouch UI "TISCH" software library (which actually supports the Wiimote as an input already, funny enough). The result is a bit of MS Surface-style multitouch picture shuffling and zooming, but it uses full body tracking instead of touchscreen input, of course. The self-effacing Florian had this to say in the video description: "I thought I'd get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done so it's out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things." You're still a hero in our book, man. Always a hero. Feeling left out on all these Kinect shenanigans because you're rocking a Mac? Well, libfreenect has also now been ported over to OS X by Theo Watson (who sounds unenthused about his accomplishment in the video embedded after the break). Also: once you're done admiring your IR-rendered visage on your shiny Apple-built hardware, scrounge yourself up a working Linux box. All the cool people are doing it.
