In Pictures: The five finest Kinect hacks

Microsoft’s innovative camera controller is built using 80g of plastic, 15 microchips, 366cm of cable and 39 screws. But when unplugged from the 360, hackers academics and homebrew coders have found thatmthese components add up to a major source of inspiration.

Below you’ll find Develop’s carefully-selected list of top five Kinect hacks, listed in no particular order.

1

Kinect Drawable Synthesiser

Who: roboczar, MIT
What is it: A great hack that allows the user to draw shapes with an ordinary pen, which are then recognised through Kinect as interactive synthesiser keys. Ultimately it allows you to perform the Beverly Hills Cop theme with your fingers and a basic note pad.

2

Hollow Man

Who: Takayuki Fukatsu
What is it: An impressive optical camouflage program built with Kinect and Openframeworks. The trick behind the illusion, which apes the famous technology of the Predator movies, remains something of a mystery amidst those in the Kinect hacks community.

3

Body Dysmorphic Disorder

Who: flight404
What is it: A realtime three dimensional morphing effect that creates a rather creepy, utterly fascinating illusion. The body Dysmorphic Disorder hack sees the bodies of all who pass in front of the connected Kinect cameras made massively oversized or underweight.

4

Sign Language Recognition

Who: Zahoor Zafrulla, Georgia Tech College of Computing
What is it: In developing a game for deaf children called CopyCat, Zafrulla and his team have achieved a staggering level of recognition of American sign language, demonstrating Kinect’s huge potential for good.

5

PR2 Teleoperation

Who: Garratt Gallagher, MIT
What is it: Demonstrating one of the most high-end hacks yet seen, MIT’s Kinect wizard Gallagher uses the Microsoft peripheral to teleoperate the futuristic PR2, usinghis own arms to guide the robot’s multijointed limbs with quite remarkable precision.