Building a better Kinect with a… pager motor?

Fresh from Microsoft Research is an ingenious way to reduce interference and decrease the error in a Kinect. Bonus: the technique only requires a motor with an offset weight, or just an oversized version of the vibration motor found in a pager.

Being the first of its kind of commodity 3D depth sensors, the tracking on a Kinect really isn’t … Read the rest

Finger recognition on the Kinect

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 CM1KRead the rest

Going to the park with your augmented reality girlfriend

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 … Read the rest

Kinetic Space: software for your Kinect projects

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 … Read the rest

3D mapping of huge areas with a 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 … Read the rest

More Kinect holograms from [programming4fun]

[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 the rest

Hackit: Leap Motions new motion sensor

The big news circulating this morning is of the Leap Motion sensor that will be hitting the market soon. They claim that their sensor is ~100 more accurate than anything else on the market right now. Check out the video to see what they mean (there’s another at the link). This is pretty impressive.  You can see the accuracy as … Read the rest