Kinect Finally Fulfills its Minority Report Destiny!!! (Link to Video)

[Reasonable]

trasharmdsister12 said:

Not to denigrate the numerous fine hacks that Kinect's undergone since its launch, but it's always nice to see the professionals come in and shake things up a little. A crew from MIT's brain labs has put together a hand detection system on Microsoft's ultra-versatile cam, which is sophisticated enough to recognize the position of both your palms and fingers. Just as a demonstration, they've tied that good stuff up to a little picture-scrolling UI, and you won't be surprised to hear that it's the closest thing to Minority Report's interactive gesture-based interface that we've seen yet. And it's all achieved with a freaking console peripheral. Video after the break.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/09/kinect-finally-fulfills-its-minority-report-destiny-video/

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I can finally make threads! But back on topic... makes me wonder why MS couldn't make this work. Still it's impressive and I hope MS looks into this. Some of the homebrew and opensource stuff for Kinect has been absolutely stunning. Realtime Camo, puppet shows, finger tracking and more.

Very cool.

As for why it's not on 360, well that depends how they're doing it.  I'm guessing they connected Kinect to a PC and wrote their own routines.  Depending on processing needs it might simply be that Kinect on its own hooked up to a 360 simply doesn't have the processing power available either in general or due to the design of Kinect libraries (which might be restircted to a specific amount of processing power to make sure enough remains free for games).

I'd note a lot of the hacks (MIT or otherwise) are based on Kinect hooked up to a PC not to a 360 and based on code written on the output from the camera rather than using any libraries specifically included with the 360 (so far as I can tell anyway).

As ever I remain a lot more interested i Kinect as an interface for general manipulation than a gaming peripheral, but hopefully we'll see future titles pull the two elements closer toegher.