PrimeSense Capri is… Kinect for Smartphones

PrimeSense, the company behind one of the most exciting advancements in video game technology over the past decade, is setting its sights on the rest of the world.

The Israel-based company develops sensor technology that is used most famously in Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller, and now PrimeSense has announced a new sensor dubbed “Capri” that is one-tenth the size of its earlier product.

As Co.Design reports, the new chipset is small enough to fit in smartphones, tablets and a number of other devices, opening up a wide new range of possibilities.

(story from BGR; more primesense.com)

Controlling GNOME 3 and playing games with Skeltrack

This video shows an example of what can be done with Skeltrack and GFreenect.

It gets the user’s head and hands’ positions from Skeltrack and interprets them in order to map some gestures with events in the desktop using Xlib with the GNOME 3 desktop.

It allows to move the mouse pointer, click and drag things and it also controls the zoom level by using both hands as a pinch gesture. The video also shows how Skeltrack can be used to play video games with both hands simulating a steering wheel.

This demo application is published under GPL and you can find its code at:
github.com/joaquimrocha/Skeltrack-Desktop-Control

Kiss Controller

Kiss Controller is a game input device that controls the direction and speed of a bowling ball while users are kissing.

The Kiss Controller interface has two components: a customized headset that functions as a sensor receiver and a magnet that provides sensor input. The user affixes a magnet to his/ her tongue with Fixodent. Magnetic field sensors are attached to the end of the headset and positioned in front of the mouth. As the user moves her tongue, this creates varying magnetic fields that are used to control games.

We demonstrate the Kiss Controller bowling game. One person has a magnet on his/her tongue and the other person wears the headset. While they kiss, the person who has the magnet on his/her tongue, controls the direction and speed of the bowling ball for 20 seconds. The goals of this game are to guide the ball so that it maintains an average position in the center of the alley and to increase the speed of the ball by moving the tongue faster while kissing.

Kissing is an intimate behavior that can be developed into a game device. It has not yet been proposed in the game industry. Kiss Controller shows how the human tongue can be used to control a game and how people can become creatively involved in a game.

(by Hye Yeon Nam and Sam Mendenhall)

The Kinect Effect

See the future possibilities of Kinect that go beyond the expected, into truly amazing things that people around the world are beginning to imagine.

Xbox & Kinect ad integration with Windows Phone

Two demonstrations of how the new Xbox interactive ads can integrate with Windows Phone.

Gesture recognition with Kinect, uirt and TV: No More Remotes

I connected my Kinect and usb-uirt to my Mac Mini. My code i integrated wit OpenNI to detect the skeleton and I’ve programed it to find some specific gestures. The code will then send pre-recorded IR signals to the TV to Switch it on/off and change volume and channels on my set-top box.

http://code42tiger.blogspot.com/