Remember last week when we told you about the bounty placed on the Kinect requesting someone to release open source drivers? And remember how that challenge was completed very shortly thereafter? Well now the first application has been developed that uses the Kinect hardware on a PC platform and it’s looking pretty good for a first attempt.
A user on YouTube by the name of floemuc has posted a video entitled, “Multitouch with Hacked Kinect (HD),” and in the 95 second video he uses his hands to move photos around a desktop, resize them, and twirl them around. The screen also shows the computer’s view of the user, even identifying the user’s hands as he tracks the images around the screen. He posted the video a mere week after the official launch of Kinect.
Floemuc commented that, “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.” According to floemuc’s post on YouTube, he used Ubuntu Linux as his development platform, libfreenect (the Kinect drivers), and libTISCH, from the “Tangible Interactive Surfaces for Collaboration between Humans” project.
This is a good start to open source applications for the Kinect. Is this going to be technology that will enter the mainstream of day-to-day computing? What other useful applications would you like to see written to take advantage of the technology on your desktop?