Via scmagazine.com:

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.

Read more!

Featured Adafruit Products

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)

Matt Cutts used our awesome Kinect/USB-hacking article to begin his USB rocket launcher hacking adventure:

I got a USB Missile Launcher for Christmas. The manufacturer, Dream Cheeky, provides software–but only for Windows XP. And I thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be fun to practice some USB reverse engineering skills?” Because another Christmas present was a USB protocol analyzer from Total Phase. I should note that plenty of other people have apparently already written drivers/software for USB missile launcher toys, but I wanted to poke around myself.

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.

Check out Matt’s project with source code and more here!

Universal Everything’s installation for Nike: your body becomes a swarm of colorful particles | AMUSEMENT.NET.

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.

Kinect hack / art / Nike & more.

via coolhunting.com:

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.

Read the full interview with Sugarkane Studio’s Manuel Emede about the making of the video here.

Continuing our exploration of 3D scanning with the Microsoft Kinect today, here are photos from 3D artist Fred Kahl from Westport Maker Faire. He has been doing a great job optimizing how he scans and prints massive numbers of people in one sequence, and even built his own custom lazy-susan “people mover” platform (shared on Thingiverse) to allow him to easily grab full body scans, and all using affordable tools and software! Check out these scans from the event from The Great Fredini’s Cabinet of Curiosities:

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.

Read more.

Check out this recent new alternative to ReconstructMe that offers full color 3D models using the Microsoft Kinect or Asus Xtion:Scanect by Manctl.

Given Adafruit’s role in encouraging the exploration of the Kinect as a hacker tool, it is a great pleasure to see all of the interesting projects appearing that make use of 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! …

Read more.

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)….

Read more.

Get the Badge!

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)

Google Earth now supports Leap Motion. Soon you’ll soar around San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Paris, NYC and more. #LeapInto Google Earth.

Easy Access to Kinect for Windows Sample Code – Kinect for Windows Developer Blog – Site Home @ MSDN Blogs.

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.

More here & BBC story.

Kinect + Brain Scan = Augmented Reality for Neurosurgeons @ IEEE Spectrum via Bruce.

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.

Gesture Studio: Developer Portal. Vlad writes -

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!

REWIND! “The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $3,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers” – November 4, 2010. Hector won 6 days later.

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).

Portable WiFi Kinect via HaD.

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.

Kinecticate: Kinect-powered Email. Chad writes -

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.

Sesame Street is using Kinect…

Sesame Workshop has recently partnered with Microsoft to leverage the Kinect for enhanced educational programming centered on interactivity.

Video above, an example we’d love to see by Theo Watson Sesame Street-ized’

Kinect@Home.

Kinect@Home is a place where you can help robotics and computer vision researchers around the world and get 3D models of your room, office or whatever you want in return, right in your browser!

Kinect@Home aims to use your powers to make robots more awesome than ever. Robotics and computer vision researchers need vast amount of images from everyday environments such as homes and offices to improve their algorithms.

The installation demonstrates how the city surface continuously gathers information about people’s movements allowing vehicles to interact with the environment. Kollision developed a real-time graphics engine and the tracking software, which receives live input from 11 Xbox Kinect cameras mounted above the visitors’ heads. Through the cameras the movement of the visitors are processed into patterns of movement displayed on the LED surface.

More Kinect hacking art.

New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry @ NYTimes.com.

Inside a spartan garage in an industrial neighborhood in Palo Alto, Calif., a robot armed with electronic “eyes” and a small scoop and suction cups repeatedly picks up boxes and drops them onto a conveyor belt.

It is doing what low-wage workers do every day around the world.

Older robots cannot do such work because computer vision systems were costly and limited to carefully controlled environments where the lighting was just right. But thanks to an inexpensive stereo camera and software that lets the system see shapes with the same ease as humans, this robot can quickly discern the irregular dimensions of randomly placed objects.

The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game system.

The Kinect hacking continues.

The V Motion Project via Netorama -

This project combines the collective talents of musicians, dancers, programmers, designers and animators to create an amazing visual instrument. Creating music through motion is at the heart of this creation and uses the power of the Kinect to capture movement and translate it into music which is performed live and projected on a huge wall.
v.co.nz/#the-motion-project

We created and designed the live visual spectacle with a music video being produced from the results. We wanted it to be clear that the technology was real and actually being played live. The interface plays a key role in illustrating the idea of the instrument and we designed it to highlight the audio being controlled by the dancer. Design elements like real time tracking and samples being drawn on as they are played all add to authenticity of the performance. The visuals are all created live and the music video is essentially a real document of the night.
assemblyltd.com/

Check out the tech behind the project here:
custom-logic.com/blog/v-motion-project-the-instrument/

Updated tutorial: Hacking the Kinect – Reverse engineering the Microsoft Kinect. Everyone has seen the Xbox 360 Kinect hacked in a matter of days after our “open source driver” bounty - here’s how we helped the winner and here’s how you can reverse engineer USB devices as well!

USB is a very complex protocol, much more complicated than Serial or Parallel, SPI and even I2C. USB uses only two wires but they are not used as ‘receive’ and ‘transmit’ like serial. Rather, data is bidirectional and differential – that is the data sent depends on the difference in voltage between the two data lines D+ and D- If you want to do more USB hacking, you’ll need to read Jan Axelson’s USB Complete books , they’re easy to follow and discuss USB in both depth and breadth.

USB is also very structured. This is good for reverse engineering because it means that at least the format of packets is agreed upon and you won’t have to deal with check-sums. The bad news is it means you have to have software assistance to decode the complex packet structure. The good news is that every computer now made has a USB host core, that does a lot of the tough work for you, and there are many software libraries to assist.

Today we’re going to be reverse engineering the Xbox Kinect Motor, one part of the Kinect device.

Read more…

The Bilibot Project.

What is Bilibot
Bilibot, from the German word ‘billig’, or cheap, is a sophisticated robotics platform at an affordable price. A Bilibot consists of:
* a powerful computer
* an iRobot create
* a Kinect sensor
* mounting hardware to put it all together
* the ROS Robotic Operating system, with research contributions from roboticists all over the world!

BITBALL Kinect | TinkerDing.

On the 25th of June people in Mainz (Germany) are about to play the classic of all video games on the street: Beamer and xBox Kinect will project the gamescreen on the floor, paddles are controlled by body movement. mediaman-colleagues from Mainz had the idea – and a lot of fun while trying, playing and programming.

How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem ! NYTimes.com.

To use a Kinect with a computer instead of an Xbox, Watson needed a “driver” (basically a bit of software) that did not exist. He joined a small, far-flung, highly dedicated and technically sophisticated community effort dubbed OpenKinect, which sprang up immediately after the Kinect was introduced, to write the code that would make this possible. At the same time, Adafruit, a hobbyist-focused electronics company based in New York, offered $1,000 to the first person or group to write the necessary code in an open-source format.

At the time — this was shortly before the 2010 holiday season — Microsoft’s primary Kinect focus was the mainstream game-playing market. Its first response to OpenKinect seemed predictable: CNET reported an unnamed spokesperson declaring that the company “does not condone the modification of its products” and would “work closely with law enforcement . . . to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.” Adafruit increased its prize, ultimately to $3,000. Within days a developer in Spain posted videos demonstrating that he made his Kinect work with a P.C. OpenKinect refined and spread the open-source driver code, and a variety of “Kinect hacks,” as they came to be called, proliferated in YouTube videos. (An early example involved a Kinect used to create a version of the hand-swipe control contraption Tom Cruise used in “Minority Report.”) Soon Watson and his wife, Emily Gobeille, posted their own video, in which her hand movements were captured by a Kinect and translated onto a screen displaying a computer-generated bird figure, which she controlled like a high-tech puppet.

Long story about the conflict and tension at Microsoft with the Kinect hacking… One note, we published the USB dump (and example) to get folks started on the open-source driver in addition to the bounty project with Johnny Lee.

from The Creators Project:

Ever since the Kinect emerged on the scene, its depth-sensing camera has fascinated legions of creative coders, but the team behind the RGB+D Toolkit is one of the few attempting to transform the gaming console into a real filmmaking tool. Using a Kinect and a standard DSLR camera, like your Canon 5D, these avant-garde image-makers have created a technique that allows you to map video from the SLR onto the Kinect’s 3D data to generate a true CGI and video hybrid.

Why is this exciting? Well, for one thing, convincing CGI is incredibly difficult to do—it took the team behind Rockstar’s L.A. Noire a full 32 cameras and god knows how many man hours to record and digitally reconstruct their characters in 360 degrees. And while the experimental output from the RGB+D team is a far cry from those painstakingly constructed game visuals, that’s kind of not the point. The point is the implications—this has the potential to change the way we think of 3D filmmaking and to significantly lower the barrier to entry using commercially available hardware and open source software.

Today, members of the RGB+D team—James George and Jonathan Minard—released the culmination of their research to date: an excerpt of an ongoing documentary project called Clouds that they’ve been developing alongside the RGB+D Toolkit, their open source video editing application (which looks like a cross between Final Cut Pro and a video game engine). Clouds features interviews with prominent computer hackers, media artists, and critics discussing the creative use of code, the future of data, interfaces, and computational visuals, presented as a series of conversational vignettes.\

Kinect as a tool of narrative film was as inevitable as sunshine in the summertime.

Engineers use XBox technology to make ‘space building blocks’ – University of Surrey – Guildford.

Space innovators at the University of Surrey and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) are developing ‘STRaND-2’, a twin-satellite mission to test a novel in-orbit docking system based upon XBOX Kinect technology that could change the way space assets are built, maintained and decommissioned.

STRaND-2 is the latest mission in the cutting edge STRaND (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator) programme, following on from the smartphone-powered STRaND-1 satellite that is near completion.  Similar in design to STRaND-1, the identical twin satellites will each measure 30cm (3 unit Cubesat) in length, and utilise components from the XBOX Kinect games controller to scan the local area and provide the satellites with spatial awareness on all three axes.

Kreek is a Kinect controlled interface which extends a normally two-dimensional multi-touch environment by the perception of depth. This allows the user to literally reach into the interface and gives applications the possibility to interprete parameters like pressure or solid distance.

Stephanie Paeper, Daniel Dormann, Lukas Höh and Mathias Demmer
web: klangfiguren.com
pictures: http://flickr.com/photos/farbfrustration/

Well, this is interesting. A startup called Leap Motion has announced a new gestural controller which they claim is more accurate than the Kinect, and sells at an even lower price point ($70!). From Edgadget:

It’s about the size of a pack of gum, and once connected to your computer via USB, it creates a four-cubic-foot virtual workspace. Within that area, it tracks all ten of your fingers simultaneously to within 1/100 of a millimeter — that level of accuracy allows for rudimentary gestures like pinch-to-zoom and more complex actions like manipulating 3D-rendered objects. Naturally, the company isn’t telling much about the black magic making it happen, but Leap Motion claims that its software can be embedded in almost anything with an onboard computer, from phones to refrigerators. Users can customize it to suit their needs with custom gestures and sensitivity settings, in addition to chaining multiple Leap devices together to create a larger workspace. Plus, Leap Motion has created an SDK for devs to create Leap-compatible applications and an app discovery platform to distribute them to others. That means the Leap can work in a variety of use cases, from simply navigating your desktop to gaming and computer-aided design. The best part? Leap brings you this next-gen UX for a mere $69.99, and a select few can pre-order them now, with the full roll-out coming this winter. Full details follow in the PR below, and you can see the Leap in action in the videos after the break.

It’s nice to see them leading with an SDK — the Kinect, which was marketed originally as a game controller, did not have an SDK at launch — but I haven’t been able to figure yet what (if any) restrictions there are for developers. Hopefully, the terms will be more free than the Microsoft SDK.

Anyway, it sounds like it might be fun to play around with. Leap Motion claims the device: “creates a 3D interaction space of 4 cubic feet to precisely interact with and control software on your laptop or desktop computer.” — that’s what it was designed for, but I wonder what else you could make it do? Hmmm…

Fire Test Using Kinect @ DorkbotPDX. Burning man art – using teensy & kinect!

RGBDToolkit via Beyond the Beyond.

RGBDToolkit overview, from our launch event: Kinect + SLR filmmaking workshop @ Resonate festival in Belgrade.

Microsoft Xbox Kinect 1.5 Launches in May and Continues to Promise a Major Shift in How We Interact with Technology via Windows 8 and Windows Phone @ Forbes.

I started to get interested in what others were doing with the Xbox Kinect after reading many interesting blog posts and seeing what a recent maker has done with it. Microsoft is quietly, in my view, building a robust community of developers who are hacking and creating in all sorts of powerful, useful, and fun ways as you’ll read here.

We think the Kinect hacking has been one of the best things that has happening to Microsoft and they seem to be embracing it as well.

Can Kinect Make Windows Cool Again? @ Businessweek.

The original Kinect helped make the Xbox 360 last year’s bestselling game console; Microsoft has sold more than 18 million Kinects since November 2010. It’s also inspired tinkerers to put the device to unanticipated uses, such as guiding robots and doing 3D modeling. With Kinect for Windows, Microsoft aims to coax professional developers and big companies to create apps that make Kinect as essential in the home, office, and showroom as smartphones are to those on the go. “This is a turnaround chance for Microsoft,” says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR). “A chance for them to say this isn’t about video gaming, it isn’t about Windows, it’s about the future of everything.”

The open source community did a great job showing the possibilities once hardware is set “free”.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 @ MSDN Blogs.

…we’re delighted to announce the general availability of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 (RDS 4) which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft Robotics website. It was just over five months ago that we announced the availability of RDS 4 Beta and since then, the Microsoft Robotics team has been hard at work putting the final touches on RDS 4 to give developers access to the software they need to build robotics applications… our own team has been using RDS 4 for a while now and we’ve come up with a few cool and unique applications. Check out the video of the Kinect Follow Me robot which was created by our team.

Of Montreal Stage Trippy Live Show Using Kinect, Google SketchUp @ Wired.com.

“There is a rapidly expanding online community of people who have been able to use the Microsoft Kinect to do really amazing things,” Gould said in an e-mail. “Thanks to their hard work, we have been able to adapt what is essentially a toy to be a part of our video show.”

http://www.ofmontreal.net/

The Kinect-A-Sketch: A Homebrew Robotic Sketcher via TechCrunch.

In this episode of Waterloo Labs we show you how we combined an XBox Kinect, an Arduino, LabVIEW and an off the shelf Etch-a-Sketch to make the Kinect-a-Sketch. This system allows you to control the Etch-a-Sketch just by standing in front of the Kinect. You can you a gigantic pencil or even just your hand.

For iRobot, the Future Is Getting Closer @ NYTimes.com.

Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of “The Jetsons” in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.

With Ava, left, iRobot is trying to do Rosey the Robot of “The Jetsons” one better. Ava will have an iPad or Androidtablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around.

Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, “kind of set expectations that robots were the future,” said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. “Then, 50 years passed.”

Now Mr. Angle’s company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. But no apron, so far.

Hacked Kinect!

James George | works | depth_editor_debug.

In a future of user-complicity in surveillance can we create a parallel narrative allowing those who are seen to abstract and enjoy their own image?

We intend for these images to represent a hint of the potential for play and experimentation in a world of advanced imaging technology.

The images depict fragments of candid photographs placed into 3-dimensional space. They use depth data captured from a Microsoft XBOX Kinect video game controller with hacked drivers, digital SLR images, and custom software.

Flying a S107 RC Helicopter using the Microsoft Kinect and the Arduino Uno. The Kinect detects my hands, head, and hips. This information is translated into x, y, z coordinates, processed with some 7th grade Algebra, and then sent to the Arduino over the serial port. The Arduino receives the signal, and converts it to a 38 kHz Infrared signal that the S107 can understand.

Phantom Limb Pain with the Kinect. Ben writes -

This is something I worked on over the summer last year and its finally out from under wraps. The idea is to create a version of the Mirror Box; effectively copying the real limb onto the Phantom Limb in order to relieve the pain that such people feel. This has been done once before with VR but now we have the kinect and cheaper VR goggles and XBee units from Adafruit, we can build a much cheaper rig and begin to investigate what works and what doesnt.

Kyle Machulis (qdot) on Twitter. We’re tweeting Shannon Loftis from Microsoft Game Studios, Studio Head for comment We’re hoping this is not true…

Update!

Microsoft Unleashes The Kinect And Promptly Misses The Point @ Co.Design.

This is not to say that a lot of amazing Kinect-based applications won’t find their way to market. For all that individuals make their way through the world by grasping and holding things, we interact with one another socially through the Kinect’s two inputs–voice and touch. The Kinect offers a way to live in society with machines. Think HAL 9000 before he went crazy. There will be great applications, but I doubt very much that the successful ones will look anything like the video.

It’s worth remembering the road that brought us here. Writing for Wired, Tim Carmody gives an excellent overview. Back in 2010, Microsoft representatives were making vaguely threatening comments about Kinect hackers as Adafruit sponsored a $3,000 bounty on the creation of open-source drivers for the device. Microsoft quickly reversed course and it was later revealed that one of the Kinect’s designers, Johnny Lee, had secretly sponsored the bounty after he failed to convince Microsoft to open up their drivers. In effect, Microsoft has had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the future.

Nice video

Limor and Phil chatted with WIRED yesterday while Limor installed a new fan system in our laser – Tim Carmody did a great job painting the landscape of what’s happened and what is to come… Microsoft Bets Big on Kinect for Windows, But Splits Its Community @ Epicenter / Wired.com.

The few bits of genuine news in Microsoft’s CES keynote on Monday all concerned Kinect, the company’s natural user interface sensor. CEO Steve Ballmer announced that 18 million devices had been sold since launch, either as standalone units or bundled with Xbox 360. A smattering of Xbox content deals with Fox and others, using Kinect as a selling point.

And finally, Kinect for Windows: a brand-new software development kit, developer program and PC-optimized hardware device launching February 1, designed to decisively push Kinect beyond gaming and media, precisely when companies like Samsung are charging behind the Xbox with gesture recognition for TV sets.

Shining a light on Kinect and pairing it with Windows shows that even with PC sales slumping, Microsoft’s future is bigger than the PC, at least as it’s been narrowly construed. It also shows that Microsoft is working towards integration of its far-flung products at a level higher than a common set of orthogonal Metro tiles. And with Kinect and Windows Phone 7 drawing raves, Microsoft’s on the verge of regaining a reputation for innovation, not just domination.

But make no mistake: this was almost entirely an accident. The push to bring the Kinect to the PC and create a developer community for the device came almost entirely outside and in spite of Microsoft. And by wrapping its arms around Kinect development, Microsoft isn’t simply embracing it or even asserting its ownership; it’s also breaking that development community into pieces.

Read more.

Wow, this is weird.

There was a time when Microsoft would not even consider a Kinect for Windows, but the open-source community created so many amazing projects (and products) a new effort was started to Window-ize and SDK-ize the Kinect to be part of all of this. And now Microsoft is selling the Kinect for Windows.

This Kinect Sensor for Windows has a shortened USB cable to ensure reliability across a broad range of computers and includes a small dongle to improve coexistence with other USB peripherals. The new firmware enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device without losing accuracy or precision, with graceful degradation down to 40 centimeters. “Near Mode” will enable a whole new class of “close up” applications, beyond the living room scenarios for Kinect for Xbox 360.

The Kinect for Windows sensor unit is intended to be used with the following:
-Kinect for Windows Commercial SDK
-An application that was developed using the Kinect for Windows Commercial SDK and associated runtime software.

Note: The senor unit does not ship with any software, and will only operate with an application developed for Kinect for Windows.

Hardware Requirements
-32 bit (x86) or 64 bit (x64) processor
-Dual-core 2.66-GHz or faster processor
-Dedicated USB 2.0 bus
-2 GB RAM

• Utilize Kinect skeletal-tracking, sophisticated microphone array, and other sensor technologies
• Link computers to Kinect devices running Windows 7 and Windows 8 Developer Preview
• Run applications built with the Kinect for Windows Commercial Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Use the Kinect for Windows SDK to build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Studio Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• The sensor will only work on computers running the SDK softawre

It’s $249 -On the box is says “FOR COMMERCIAL USE”. And also says “Kinect for Windows Commercial Software Development Kit (SDK)”. That seems to include the commercial SDK. Not sure what the terms are, anyone know?

It seems to have different firmware, some different hardware… We’ll see if it works with the open-source drivers, and if not – someone will need to do a bounty to hack it, again… We wonder if they’re shipping hardware that can only be used if you agree to some terms before you get the SDK… It seems to be completely free?

We have chosen a hardware-only business model for Kinect for Windows, which means that we will not be charging for the SDK or the runtime; these will be available free to developers and end-users respectively. As an independent developer, IT manager, systems integrator, or ISV, you can innovate with confidence knowing that you will not pay license fees for the Kinect for Windows software or the ongoing software updates, and the Kinect for Windows hardware you and your customers use is supported by Microsoft.

It does say you need to buy this new hardware though…

Although we encourage all developers to understand and take advantage of the additional features and updates available with the new Kinect for Windows hardware and accompanying software, those developers using our SDK and the Kinect for Xbox 360 hardware may continue to use these in their development activities if they wish. However, non-commercial deployments using Kinect for Xbox 360 that were allowed using the beta SDK are not permitted with the newly released software. Non-commercial deployments using the new runtime and SDK will require the fully tested and supported Kinect for Windows hardware and software platform, just as commercial deployments do. Existing non-commercial deployments using our beta SDK may continue using the beta and the Kinect for Xbox 360 hardware; to accommodate this, we are extending the beta license for three more years, to June 16, 2016.

We don’t have an opinion on this yet, we’re jet-lagged – give us a few to think this one over

Read more…

FIRST Robotics Competition kicks off. Cruz writes -

The FIRST Robotics Competition just kicked off, with a new challenge this year, and a new twist: Teams will have the chance to control their robots using Microsoft’s Kinect sensor!

Instructables, Android, Linux “Tux” Penguin, CadSoft EAGLE, Blender, High Altitude Balloon, Processing, Tesla Coil, Beagle Bone, Hacked Kinect. Special thanks to the cool companies and orgs that granted us permission for the ones we needed to ask permission for! And to our artist Bruce for many of these and our awesome partner NeedleNerds.

Well, this is interesting. Among the rumors surrounding the next generation XBox and ancillary technology is the suggestion that the next-gen Kinect will not use USB to interface with the console. Apparently the resolution of the Kinect 2 will be so high that USB cannot handle the throughput. From Eurogamer:

The current Kinect is hamstrung by having to pass data to the Xbox 360 through ageing USB technology – an issue discussed by Eurogamer last year.

When Kinect launched in November 2010 the depth sensor was set at a 30 frames per second limit and a 320×240 resolution limit. The issue relates to the USB controller interface, which is capable of around 35MB/s, but it only uses around 15/16MB/s. This artificial limit is in place because multiple USB devices can be used at once on an Xbox 360.

Kinect 2, however, can feed the next Xbox more information, and thus a higher resolution CCD [charge-coupled device].

“It can be cabled straight through on any number of technologies that just take phenomenally high res data straight to the main processor and straight to the main RAM and ask, what do you want to do with it?” our source said.

I wonder what kind of bus system they’re going to use to move all that data. More to the point, I wonder if said bus will be encrypted.

What do you think?