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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
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MIT kids use Kinect to surf the web, start a gold rush
By Rodney H. Brown
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Now that Microsoft Corp. has done a 180 and now supports people hacking its new Kinect full-body motion control system, real-world applications beyond dance games are coming fast and furious. The latest is from the MIT Media Lab and is eerily reminiscent of the movie “Minority Report.”
Researchers at the Media Lab created an open-source extension for the Chrome browser from Google Inc. that allows the browser to be controlled using hand gestures detected by a hacked Kinect system. Using gestures like a grab, or an up or down swipe can do things like click on links or scroll up or down in web pages. The software is called DepthJS and apparently is just a Javascript program that connects to the hacked code that runs the Kinect. A video posted on ReadWriteWeb shows the young researchers demonstrating the web browsing and it looks smooth and responsive.
An article on the New Scientist magazine website explains how Microsoft came around to seeing the value in encouraging the hacking of the Kinect for uses other than games – essentially it had no choice. When a New York-based producer of DIY electronics kits, Adafruit Industries, offered a $1,000 reward to the first person to show they had hacked the Kinect to run on a PC, and posted their code to an open-source forum, Microsoft responded with bluster and lawyers. Apparently Adafruit immediately upped its offer to $2,000, and within a couple of days the Kinect was hacked by a young coder in Spain.
Once the genie was out of the bottle, Microsoft announced it was actually fine with open-source hacks of the Kinect. In fact, it said that was the plan all along, that the system was left open by design.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that perhaps Microsoft at first threatened and bloviated about the hacking attempts just to make it look like they were upset, so that the hacker community would move even more quickly to hack the Kinect and find cool uses for it. Once they do, and once the first spinout business rolls out of MIT or Carnegie Mellon or Stanford, you can bet Microsoft will be there with licensing documents in hand, saying open-source is fine, but a commercial use requires payments.
Now, where’s my gesture interface for World of Warcraft? What application would you like to see get “Kinected”? (Trademark pending)
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