Finally, a chance to re-enact our favorite scene from Big -- and also watch two guys recreate it! The latest Kinect Hack is simply called Keyboard Anywhere, an apt title because that's pretty much what it does. You can size the keyboard based on your space -- the video past the break shows it being applied to several different surfaces, including a desk and the floor. Hit the jump to see it in action.
#xbox360
We've known that Microsoft's racing contender, Forza, would get controller-free Kinect support in some fashion since E3. Microsoft makes it doubly official today, naming Forza Motorsport 4 as the Kinect-powered "definitive racing game of 2011." More »
With a quick tease during this past weekend's Spike VGAs, Turn 10 Studios revealed its next project: Forza Motorsport 4. Microsoft confirmed today that Forza 4 will feature Kinect functionality -- the teaser trailer we've dropped after the break shows a brief moment that looks identical to a few of the features we saw at E3 this year.
Additionally, the studio is working with the US version of Top Gear "to create an automotive experience unlike anything before it" -- perhaps Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson has been cloned and will ship with copies of the game, cheering and jeering players as they pilot supercars? That remains to be seen. What we do know is that Forza 4 will drift into retail outlets sometime next fall.
We thought that Ubisoft would be the recipient of a lawsuit over its Kinect-equipped fighting game, Fighters Uncaged, but we'd assumed said suit would have something to do with the game's near-lethal terribleness. As it turns out, the Ultimate Fighting Championship took umbrage with the game for another reason: The organization is claiming that the game's on-the-box catchphrase of "Become the Ultimate Fighting Weapon" too closely mirrors the group's name, and may cause shoppers to think they're actually purchasing an officially licensed UFC game.
The group is seeking unspecified damages from Ubisoft, as well as a ceasing of sales of the game until the offending phrase is removed from its packaging. Man, first "It's On Like Donkey Kong," and now this -- is nothing sacred anymore? We can't count the number of times we refer to ourselves in conversation as the "Ultimate Fighting Machines" or "The Kings of Ultimate Fighting." We're talking like, dozens of times per day.
Kinect has already gained the ability to fly, and now it can drive. Researchers at University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect sensor and a laptop to a small (formerly) remote-controlled car, loaded it with software based on the program used to run the MuCAR-3 in the DARPA Urban Challenge, and made a tiny, self-navigating car.
In the video after the break, the adorable little robot proves that it can carefully avoid obstacles -- even really tiny traffic cones. We're left with only one question after this demonstration: where can we get our own tiny traffic cones?
The global hacking community has already done an admirable job of exploiting the technology inside Kinect, but now would be motion control designers can get the tech straight from the source. PrimeSense, the company that created the motion-sensing tech inside each Kinect, has released open source drivers that will work either with Kinect or its own dev kit, which Develop notes is "smaller and lighter" than a Kinect unit.
PrimeSense has partnered with two other companies to create OpenNI, a not-for-profit organization set up to "promote the compatibility and interoperability of Natural Interaction (NI) devices, applications and middleware." The drivers are available on the OpenNI website, as is the NITE motion tracking middleware. OpenNI binaries are available for both Windows and Ubuntu.
With some pretty amazing Kinect projects already out there, we can't wait to see what comes of this officially backed software release. Check out a quick demonstration of the software's skeleton tracking capabilities after the break.
Programmer/artist Chris O'Shea has tapped even more of the Kinect's potential as a nerd fantasy-fulfillment device -- using its hand-tracking abilities, he's turned the gadget into an air guitar simulator. Check out the video after the jump to watch his wild gesticulations turn into sweet riffs.
November is traditionally a big, big month for games, thanks to the impending holidays and the temporary financial insanity bestowed upon Americans by the Black Friday Effect. This November may have been the biggest. The NPD reports that last month was the "best November on record in terms of new physical retail sales," ahead of November 2008 by around $30 million. Call of Duty: Black Ops had the biggest first month of any game ever, with 8.4 million copies.
And Microsoft (producer of the best-selling non-DS console) tells us that with 1.37 million consoles sold, November 2010 was not only the biggest November ever for Xbox, it was the biggest month ever. Thanks, Kinect! Thanks, new hardware! Handhelds were actually down vs. previous years, though the DS was still the top-selling console, with the Mario red DSi XL representing the majority of sales. Nintendo said that "over 1.5 million" DS systems were sold last month.
After the break, check out the top-selling games of the month. You already know what's at number one, of course. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood follows at #2, with surprisingly strong debuts for both Fable 3 and Donkey Kong Country Returns down the list.
A full Minority Report interface is one of the endgame dreams of Kinect hackers. We've seen plenty of brilliant Kinect hacks so far, but this latest one by members of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is the closest thing we've seen to the dream.
The hack uses several components to distinguish fingers, allowing hand detection of 60,000 points at 30 frames a second. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of techno-babble gobbledygook (yes, it's a scientific term), you can go here. For those who just want to see something cool, go past the break.
#clips
So many Kinect hacks have teased a "Minority Report" style interface. Picked at its edges, approached it with half steps. This clip shows it's not only possible with Microsoft's new camera, it's possible right now. More »
#clips
Now that Microsoft's Kinect camera sensor has been hacked from mere video game controller to homebrew developer's plaything, we've seen some amazing new applications. This flying machine that uses the Xbox 360 camera's "eyes" to see is (perhaps) the coolest. More »
Two more crazy Kinect hacks have been captured on video, making a nice thematic pairing. First, Razorfish's DaVinci software has been ported to Kinect, allowing users to draw onscreen by making gestures, and then interact with those drawn objects Crayon Physics-style.
Second, researchers at UC Berkeley's Hybrid Systems lab mounted a Kinect on an autonomous quadracopter, allowing the machine to sense its surroundings in 3D. You know who else invented a crazy helicopter thing? That's right -- Da Vinci! We told you there was a theme.
Check out both videos after the break, and ponder the question: if Kinect can now fly around on its own, why would it want to stay home and play MotionSports with you?
In the fall of 2006, global shortages of the Wii were met with accusations of "managed scarcity" - the polite way of saying that Nintendo was keeping inventory low to help weave a tale of unprecedented demand. Four years of steady sales (well ... let's agree on three-and-a-half) has helped clear Nintendo's good name; however, similar accusations are evidently being levied against Microsoft, which has been accused of managing shortages of the Kinect in the UK and Ireland to "stimulate demand," according to GamesIndustry.biz.
"Anyone who actually works in the business of producing new technology, especially hardware technology, will know that these things are never managed," general manager for Xbox in the UK and Ireland Neil Thompson told GI. "Everyone else loves to think that they're managed, but they will know it's not. It's a function of coming to market with a brand new innovation and you have to scale up."
With a goal of 5 million units in consumers' hands worldwide by the end of 2010, and a post-Black Friday milestone of 2.5 million already sold, Microsoft doesn't seem to be in the business of withholding inventory. Thompson said that the decision to launch in November was a "balance," and Kinect could have waited "until February, March when we could hit some bigger launch numbers but then we miss Christmas." Also to blame for any shortages at retailers: that worldwide release. Xbox UK marketing manager Stephen McGill told GI, "With Kinect we launched around the world in three weeks. That was a huge task. No region is being penalised."
As much as we want to trust a Microsoft marketing manager, we thought we'd instead conduct an entirely scientific poll to determine if there's any global concern with Kinect shortages. View Poll
#burgerking
For those who bought Whopper meals, Burger King and Microsoft gave away a Kinect every fifteen minutes in America until the motion sensor launched late last month. That's over 1,500 Kinects! In Japan, twenty Kinects will be given out. More »
These Kinect hacks just keep getting better and better. This latest is from YouTube user TakayukiFukatsu and turns him invisible. Just let that sink in for a moment then hop past the break to see him do his best Kevin Bacon impression.
You'll be able to play the weird Kinect Pac-Man minigame on February 8.
That's also when you'll be able to play the rest of Namco Bandai's Body and Brain Connection, the brain training/exercise collection from Brain Age consultant Dr. Ryuta Kawashima -- but it's more interesting to think about it as the Kinect Pac-Man thing, with bonus brain training and exercise-based minigames.
Namco Bandai also sent out a bunch of new screens of the intellectually stimulating minigames contained within Connection. You get to work out with an animated light bulb! How many games let you do that?
#coolness
You know in Predator how the creature is able to cloak itself in the surroundings and appear almost invisible? Well, someone figured out how to do that on Kinect. More »
#xbox360
In June 2009, Microsoft premiered a terrific hype trailer - "product vision," they called it - for the device that would become this season's Xbox 360 Kinect sensor. Vision trailers tend not to match reality. How close did Microsoft get? More »
#sex
People are hacking Kinect, doing all sorts of amazing things with it like mapping their rooms and turning into a bloated mutant. But when does the screwing start? More »
#xbox360
With one Kinect motion-sensing camera, we can see part of our surroundings in 3D. With two, however, we can actually generate 3D models of our surroundings. More »
The Kinect launch was pretty much dominated by one third-party publisher: Ubisoft. Despite plenty of announcements at TGS and that Star Wars game, there isn't much on the docket from the bigger third-party devs. THQ's Danny Bilson promised on Twitter earlier today that would change.
"We will be announcing one Core Kinect game soon," Bilson wrote in a missive. This followed an earlier tweet where Bilson promised a "big game announcement" at the upcoming VGAs, but it's likely he's referring to the Guillermo Del Toro game (again) and not this Kinect title. Regardless, we've followed up with Bilson for comment and will let you know what we find out.
Microsoft's crawl towards its "five million units in 2010" sales goal for Kinect turned into more of a headfirst dash during these past few deal-packed days. The company has announced that the device's global sales have reached 2.5 million, supported by retailer discounts on the hardware and its console bundle over Black Friday weekend, as well as the hardware's arrival in additional territories across the globe.
Of course, to reach its lofty goal, the Kinect's going to have move a considerable number of units next month -- but Microsoft Interactive Entertainment president Don Mattrick boasts in a press release that "we are on pace to reach our forecast of 5 million units sold to consumers this holiday." In the end, though, that's completely in the hands of the holiday shopping lists of the world. Also, Santa Claus.
#microsoft
It took ten days for Microsoft's Kinect to hit one million sales. Now Microsoft reveals that the device has sold 2.5 million units in 25 days. This can only mean one thing: Someone is buying 100,000 Kinects a day. More »
Kinect had what most people would call a successful launch, moving over one million units worldwide during its first week on store shelves; however, the device wasn't met with quite as warm a reception in Japan. According to Media Create, Microsoft's new all-seeing eye had a "quiet start" in the region, moving just 26,000 units during its launch weekend of November 20 -- that includes both standalone and 360-bundled Kinects.
Also troubling is that no Kinect games made it onto Media Create's Top 20 software sales chart. The highest-selling launch title was DanceMasters, which managed to sell 6,000 copies. On the other hand, four PlayStation Move launch titles made it onto the Top 20 during the controller's launch week, with a combined total of 50,000 copies sold. There's a lot of factors at play, here -- the data coming from a two-day period, the lower install base for the 360, and so on -- but Microsoft's going to have to make a concerted effort if it wants to get the peripheral off the ground in Japan.
#clips
This unholy marriage of Microsoft technology and Nintendo software comes from Yankeyan, who probably just gave Shigeru Miyamoto an inspiration for the Wii's next exergaming title. More »
#screengrab
At a time when it seems every fourth tech geek is hacking the Xbox Kinect sensor, Atsushi Tadokoro makes his hack look the prettiest. [As seen on his Flickr page; see a video of the hack at Vimeo.] More »
A new Kinect hack -- dubbed "DepthJS" -- allows Microsoft's frequently repurposed camera to interact with a web browser via Javascript. Its creators, from the MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group, envision "all sorts of applications that run in the browser," and demonstrate fairly simple website navigation in their video (embedded after break). Making a fist enables selection, a semi-dismissive swatting motion allows scrolling, and giving it the finger automatically posts a hateful comment on a game review you didn't agree with. (Okay, that last thing isn't true.)
Meanwhile, Evoluce, a Munich-based software company, has shown Microsoft Windows 7 applications being controlled through Kinect. The associated video shows multi-touch support, with the user being able to zoom in on images or draw using two hands at once. It also makes resizing pictures of adorable animals very easy, which should come in handy for your bandwidth-limited nature blog.
