5 Month Retrospective of the Hacked Kinect

Nintendo's Wii Remote came close, but never has a video game peripheral garnered such adoration from the hacker community than the Kinect.

Since the release of Microsoft's controller-free gaming device last November, there has literally been thousands of fun and useful projects that took use of its RGB camera and depth sensitivity functions. And thanks to publicly available open source drivers, we've seen applications in robotics, x-ray vision and even full-body World of WarCraft gaming.

The Kinect is an inspiration and powerful tool to all developers, artists and researchers. This montage from jcl5m highlights some of the best uses of the Kinect's RGB camera and depth sensor from its first five months on the market. Also, check out our recent retrospective of the hacked Kinect for the history behind it all!

You can see the individual projects from the video below (in order of appearance).

1) Raw Depth

2) Body Inflation

3) PinBoard

4 & 5) Music Video

6) Be Your Own Souvenir

7 & 8) Motion Capture

9) Ball Pool

10) Human Tetris

11) Knocking Down Walls

12) Comic Book Effects

13) iPod Commercial

14) Puppet Show

15) Super Mario

16) Floor Piano

17) Line Dance

18) Evil Genius Simulator

19) Light Saber

20) DaVinci UI

21) Touchscreen UI

22) Multitouch on Any Surface

23) Anatomy Mirror

24) Turtle Bot

25) Autonomous Quad-copter

26) Humanoid Robot Teleoperation

27) Muscle Stimulation

28) Object Recognition

29) Assisting the Blind

30) Sign Language

Photo by fo.ol