While Hollywood often fails to accurately portray hacking, one researcher has made the art of exploitation look more like the big screen.
Security researcher and creator of p0wnlabs, Jeff Bryner, showcased the Kinectasploit game at Defcon 20. The game is a product of the improbable melding of Microsoft’s Kinect gaming motion-sensor with hacking tools such as Metasploit.
Together with the Blender 3D environment toolkit, Kinectasploit allows hackers to break wireless networks, launch web attacks and run forensics using body gestures in the style of a first person shooter.
Players are represented as an avatar within a series of three-dimensional rooms, each one housing different hacking tools which materialise from the walls in an event inspired from a scene in The Matrix.
Hacked Kinect – Skill badge, iron-on patch – You can made a cool project using the (hacked) Kinect! Adafruit offers a fun and exciting “badges” of achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share. (read more)
Total Phase makes a high-speed USB 2.0 protocol analyzer for $1200, or a regular-speed USB protocol analyzer for $400. Here’s a trick someone mentioned: if you get the cheaper protocol analyzer and need to work with a high-speed USB device, you may be able to plug the high-speed device into a low-speed USB hub to slow the device down.
I decided to start with ladyada’s excellent guide to hacking a Kinect by reverse engineering USB packets. So here’s what I did.
Universal Everything created an installation to promote Nike’s latest technology, Flyknit. The four sides of a video cube stream a slightly altered version of the visitor’s reflection. Kinect cameras capture his presence and translate it in a swarm of colorful particles that follow the visitor’s movement. The installation was presented during the Milano Design week and will be touring the world through out October.
AMUSEMENT RATE: Nike is always great at surrounding itself with the best creative people in order to promote its products. This Universal Everything installation is no exception. The studio did a great job at combining Nike’s promotion needs with an artistic and interactive approach that would entertain the visitors. The freedom of movement brought by the Flyknit technology find a direct translation in the generative design piece created by Universal Everything.
Made exclusively using Kinect and RGBDToolkit, Sugarkane created an incredible music video for the new single “Quand’ero Giovane” from Franco Battiato, an Italian songwriter recognized for his enduring commitment to experimentation. To understand the intricate design details of the innovative project, we recently spoke with Manuel Emede.
The debut of Coney Island Scan-A-Rama at Westport Makerfaire on Saturday was a huge success! We had a continuous line of people waiting to be scanned all day, and managed to scan well over 100 people! I was a little nervous about how things would go, but things were very smooth and the scans all seem quite good. I’m getting file cleanup down to a science and am getting faster at processing them for printing. So far I’ve processes about a third of the files and will aim to get them all done and posted by next weekend. In the meantime I have a couple screenshots of some of the scans. Some of the family shots were quite touching. I even ran off one as a test print today and did an acetone polish on it. Looks great! I’m really excited about it.
With Skanect, capturing a full color 3d model of an object, a person or a room has never been so easy and affordable. Skanect transforms your Microsoft Kinect or Asus Xtion camera into an ultra-low cost scanner able to create 3D meshes out of real scenes in a few minutes. Enter the world of 3D scanning now!
Ultra-Low Cost
Skanect leverages consumer-grade 3D cameras, thereby limiting the hardware cost to a fraction of the cost of previous scanning solutions. For a personal and hobbyist use, you can even download a free version of Skanect!
Fast
Unlike existing technologies, Skanect can acquire dense 3D information about a scene at up to 30 frames per second. Just move around your camera to capture a full set of viewpoints, and you will get a mesh at interactive speeds.
Easy-to-use
Skanect makes it easy to scan different kind of scenes by providing a set of predefined scenarios, suitable for most use cases. Then share your models online in a few clicks, no need to be a trained professional to start scanning! …
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
As attention to the 3D scanners appearing on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo and the announcement from MakerBot about their scanner development project, here is a fun introduction to one form of DIY 3D scanning already starting to reach wide circulation: 3D scanning with the Kinect. From Open Electronics:
It only takes a Microsoft Kinect and a computer to scan things and create models of sufficient quality to be 3D printed.
There are a lot of well-known approaches based on laser, video projectors, cameras to create “point clouds” of a 3D surface (thanks to partially open softwares). Now, we have a cheap dedicated hardware that is ready to provide a 3D representation of what’s in front of it. Microsoft Kinect, hacked thanks to some tenacious developers, is now emerging as a simple and effective tool to acquire three-dimensional models. From desktop size stuff up to furniture or the whole person, Kinect can be miraculous on its own.
This is not the right solution to duplicate small object: it’s “resolution” and the volume in which Kinect works best, make the Kinect not suitable for small items such as figurines or small, detailed, objects .
The ingredients
You need a Kinect (Xbox, PC versions or the “compatible” Asus Xtion Pro), a personal computer with ATI or NVIDIA graphics accelerator card and then the ReconstructMe software with the appropriate driver.
Unfortunately, this is not a fully open source solution: it’s a free SDK for non-commercial use (a license fee applies for professional purposes)….
Hacked Kinect – Skill badge, iron-on patch: You can made a cool project using the (hacked) Kinect! Adafruit offers a fun and exciting “badges” of achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share. (read more)
We are happy to announce we are releasing the Kinect for Windows samples under an open source license. You can find everything on CodePlex: http://kinectforwindows.codeplex.com/. We have posted a total of 22 unique samples in C#, C++, and Visual Basic.
With a little duct tape, a touch screen tablet, and their new Kinect API, the Microsoft Research Cambridge team built an augmented reality system to help brain surgeons visualize 3D brain scans. Kinect Fusion supplies 3D modeling of anything, which could fuel some seriously neat medical innovations. (The Cambridge team also built KinEtre, which lets you posses anything.) At the 13th annual Microsoft TechFest, Ben Glocker demoed a prototype system that would allow neurosurgeons to prepare for surgery by looking inside a patient’s brain before they cut it open. Doctors could see the skeleton, brain, blood vessels, and the targeted tumor on a tablet—which they can move around the patient’s head—helping them to plot the best brain surgery path.
I know that Adafruit was a big supporter of the Microsoft Kinect when it first came out. I just wanted to share with you a piece of software for the Kinect that we have developed called Gesture Studio. It allows anyone to record, edit and recognize gestures using the Kinect and it is completely free for non commercial use. Using Gesture Studio Lite, users can then take these gestures and bind them to key presses for use with other applications. I know that Adafruit has been focusing on the Raspberry Pi and more electronics then the Kinect but I thought people might want to dig out their Kinect units and try this software out. Thanks for your time!
Work-in-progress prototype for an upcoming project involving volumetric slitscanning using kinect (should it be called surface-scanning?). Similar to traditional slitscanning (see flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan for more on traditional photographic slitscanning), but instead of working with 2D images + time, this technique uses spatial + temporal data stored in a 4D Space-Time Continuum, and 3 dimensional temporal gradients (i.e. not just slitscanning on the depth/rgb images, but surface-scanning on the animated 3D point cloud).
We have developed a mobile, battery-powered, wireless depth camera based on (and compatible with) Microsoft’s Kinect. In order to promote the use of this device across a wide range of domains, we are making the circuit diagrams and PCB layouts for the additional circuitry available. Our design only uses the front ‘camera’ circuit board of the Kinect, a second bespoke board of the same small size that plugs onto the back of this board in place of the standard large kinect board, which in turn plugs via USB into a Gumstix embedded linux computer running an open source driver and streams via an 802.11n dongle. The design would work equally well with a Raspberry Pi or other SBCs with a bit of hacking.
This work is part of the RCUK Digital Economy PATINA project, for more information see www.patina.ac.uk.
Below is a video of an early version we built last year.
My mom has lived with aphasia ever since she suffered a serious stroke twelve years ago. In the meantime, there’s been a revolution in communication – powered by social media. Like a lot of people, I use the phone less. One of my areas of interest has been bridging the digital “keyboard gap” for people like my mom.
If anyone asks why hack a Kinect, here’s a good video to show them.
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