SherWeb 
Microsoft’s XBOX 360 motion-detecting system, Kinect, apparently isn’t just for games. At least, that’s what some clever hackers seem to be demonstrating. With some of the highly innovative ways the Kinect is being adapted, gesture-control is making the sci-fi world of Minority Report an approaching reality.
Only a short time after its release, here are some the notable Kinect hacks I’ve heard of so far…
Using Kinect to Navigate the Web
Lets start with what some geeks over at the MIT Media Lab have shown us. The MIT team comprised of Aaron Zinman, Doug Fritz, Roy Shilkrot, and Greg Elliot, designed what they call a Depth JS hack, which lets Javascript talk to the gesture-based control system and allows you to navigate web pages among other things.
Using simple hand gestures, you can navigate open tabs, select links, scroll, see your browsing history, pan and zoom. Soon we can say goodbye to carpel tunnel syndrome!
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Using Kinect to Control Windows 7
Evoluce software, a leader in multi-touch and gesture control solutions also lent its hand in hacking Kinect, allowing a person to control multiple multi-touch and multi-gesture Windows 7 applications, including Flash and Java.
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Using Kinect to Recreate Yourself in 3-D
Oliver Kreylos, a researcher in virtual reality at the University of California combined the color and the depth image captured by the Microsoft Kinect, to project the color image back out into space and create a “holographic” representation of the person or objects being captured. The goal of this project was to develop the software necessary to connect an unmodified, off-the-shelf, Kinect device to a regular computer, and use it as a 3D camera for a variety of 3D graphics and virtual reality applications.
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Using Kinect to Control Robotics
The people over at Willow Garage (a company who develops hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications) have offered a hack that uses Kinect to control one its PR2 robots. With enough improvement, such a system may provide enough precision to perform remote medical procedures, explosive detonation and mine sweeping, and other implementations where robotic interfaces could be successfully paired with precise human control.
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Microsoft has been doing a bit of a back-and-forth gig on its stance on people tampering with its new toy- but now the company seems to be pretty open to tinkering- which I think will save them millions on R&D and open a new dimension of possibilities for this incredible technology.
Wow, my daughter really wants the Kinect but I had no idea how powerful it is. I really hate that you can’t browse the web with the 360 anyway. It’s amazing how a new piece of hardware can come out and people unravel its true potential. It seems like hardware like this has a lot of potential, makes you wonder where gaming will be in 20 years. Great article guys, keep it up!
like it very mych
It’s funny that you threw a picture of Tom Cruise from minority report up there. I remember when I saw the first tech demo of the Kinect that’s exactly what I thought of. I remember thinking that technology like that was impossible. And now, here it is, sorta. I think it’s pretty awesome all the different things the Kinect is capable of. Thank you for the great article. I think I am going to be getting one soon!