Robot trash can catches anything you throw near it

waste-basket-can-catch-better-than-anyone

This guy is about to toss the blue ball half way between the book shelf and the waste basket. By the time it gets there the waste basket will have moved into position to catch the ball perfectly. It'll do the same for just about anything you throw. We're unable to read the captions but it looks like this may have been made as part of a commercial which is shown in the first few seconds of the … [Read more...]

Finger recognition on the Kinect

vulcan

The Kinect is awesome, but if you want to do anything at a higher resolution detecting a person's limbs, you're out of luck. [Chris McCormick] over at CogniMem has a great solution to this problem: use a neural network on a chip to recognize fingers with hardware already connected to your XBox. The build uses the very cool CogniMem CM1K neural network on a chip trained to tell the difference … [Read more...]

Going to the park with your augmented reality girlfriend

dating

Lonely? Bored? Really into J-pop? If you're any of these things, here's the build for you. It's an augmented reality system that allows you to go on a date with one of Japan's most popular virtual singers. The character chosen to show off this augmented reality girlfriend tech is [Hatsune Miku], a voice synthesizer personified as a doll-eyed anime  avatar. [Miku] is an immensely popular … [Read more...]

Kinetic Space: software for your Kinect projects

kinetic-space

For all of you that  found yourselves wanting to use Kinect to control something but had no idea what to do with it, or how to get the data from it, you're in luck. Kineticspace is a tool available for Linux/mac/windows that gives you the tools necessary to set up gesture controls quickly and easily. As you can see in the video below, it is fairly simple to set up. You do you action, set the … [Read more...]

3D mapping of huge areas with a Kinect

kinect

The picture you see above isn't a doll house, nocliped video game, or any other artificially created virtual environment. That bathroom exists in real life, but was digitized into a 3D object with a Kinect and Kintinuous, an awesome piece of software that allows for the creation of huge 3D environments in real time. Kintinuous is an extension of the Kinect Fusion and … [Read more...]

More Kinect holograms from [programming4fun]

WALL-E

[programing4fun] has been playing around with his Kinect-based 3D display and building a holographic WALL-E controllable with a Windows phone. It's a 'kid safe' version of his Terminator personal assistant that has voice control and support for 3d anaglyph and shutter glasses. When we saw [programming4fun]'s Kinect hologram setup last summer we were blown away. By tracking a user's head … [Read more...]

Making real-life portals with a Kinect

portal

[radicade] wanted to know what real life portals would look like; not something out of a game, but actual blue and orange portals on his living room wall. Short of building a portal gun, the only option available to [radicade] was simulating a pair of portals with a Kinect and a projector. One of the more interesting properties of portals is the ability to see through to the other side - you … [Read more...]