Kinect running on Android
Microsoft’s Kinect has been made to work on Android by a clever YouTube user. So far it’s just a proof of concept (i.e it doesn’t really do much), but it will be very interesting to see what people can do with this “hack”. Kinect is Microsoft’s answer to the Wii and PlayStation Move, and arguably much more advanced system that skips controllers altogether and gets motion control from the movements of the player directly. It does so using two cameras which basically act as a 3D sensor. Kinect has already been used to do some things that it definitely wasn’t meant to do and I’m glad to see it has now made it to a tablet OS as well.
The Kinect concept is pretty genius, and has a lot of applications outside gaming. Imagine a tablet with dual front facing cameras that can see your hand waving in front of the screen. Among the simplest yet most useful applications of such a system would be to flip pages in books, control video playback etc- things that normally require that you smear your greasy fingers all over the screen. I would love to be able to clean my iPad before sitting down to read a magazine or watch a movie and not have finger marks on it 2 seconds later when I have to interact with the controls in some way. Tablet gaming is another possibility, and I’m sure a version of Angry Birds where you flick your fingers to shoot the birds would be among the first games out…
Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but we’re living in a time where today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s common tech. Getting Kinect to work on Android is a brilliant hack either way, and we can only wish the guy who did it (and anyone who wants to join in on creating something with it) the best of luck.
