World of Warcraft hits Kinect

US researchers have managed to adapt Kinect and use it to control Blizzard’s MMO behemoth World of Warcraft.

An Institute for Creative Technologies team working out of the University of Southern Carolina have developed FAAST – middleware that translates physical gestures to in-game actions through Microsoft’s motion controller, according to Wired.

FAAST stands for Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit and works in a similar way to custom keyboard mappings. The build that has been demonstrated uses left hand motions to control the camera, right hand ones to select attacks, and hunching for character movement.

However, the team’s leader Evan Suma admitted the system is limited and not ideally suited to prolonged WoW sessions.

If you’re in casual play, at a basic level you can go around and do enough spells for common tasks,” he said. You can grind for levelling, go on quests… but this isn’t going to be substitute for your keyboard and mouse.”