[games_access] Kinect Hacked for Flash, Silverlight, Etc

[Michelle Hinn]

Did anyone catch this story yesterday about how Blitz hacked the Kinect so that it can be used for Flash games, etc? They also released an open source kit for it -- I'm seeing a lot of potential for trying to do some demos and/or conversions of some one switch games that might be able to be more accessible for those with some arm movements but not full arm movements. I'm not sure, though, how well this will work with that "must be six feet away from the camera but maybe the camera could be mounted on a wall shelf and then the computer monitor could be closer to the person playing.

Here are the opening paragraphs to the story:

"BLITZ, the interactive agency behind campaigns for HALO, Nike, Starbucks, DIRECTV, FX and so on, has today released the source code and scripts for hacking Microsoft’s Kinect hands-free motion controller to allow it to output data to platforms such as Flash, Silverlight, Unity or HTML.
A limitation of Kinect is that everything that has to be done with C++, a language that doesn’t lend itself well to creating rich user interfaces. A solution that Noah Gedrich and Yosef Flomin of BLITZ have come up with is to set up a socket server that C++ can connect to and send the output from the Kinect to a listener, such as a Flash application, Silverlight application, Unity, HTML or whatever."

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/blitz-hacks-xbox-360-kinect-for-flashsilverlightunityhtml/10930

And here's the Blitz site:

http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=2634

I'm sure that there are tech issues that make this more difficult than it sounds but I think it's a cool step forward. I know that this probably doesn't make Microsoft super happy that this happened BUT it could easily result in more sales of Kinect (which is already selling like mad!) and it's a big kudos for all that Microsoft has done to introduce this innovative technology that is obviously so popular that it has attracted hackers.

Michelle


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