Christmas came a little late at the PlaceMatters office, but we have ourselves an XBox Kinect sans XBox. Why? Well, as Jacob indicated in his last roundup, this handy piece of hardware is quite a powerful device. Now that we have one here ourselves, we’re going to see what small projects we can do. We’ve already used the Wiimote hack to create low cost pen-screens, now we’re curious what depth perception could allow us to do.
Could we track objects on map? Maybe translate physical game chips into digital forms in a scenario planning tool? Capture sketch planning? Maybe create some 3D holgrams? While motion tracking is interesting to us, I’m very excited about seeing what we can do around object detection as this gives us a low cost way to merge real participant interactions with digital capture. Tell us in the comments ideas of how you would like to see the Kinect used in a planning/mapping/civic engagement context.
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I can’t wait to see what planning applications you all come up with for the Kinect! I think the combo of voice, video and depth perception is pretty powerful in a tool for public engagement. Now I just need to finagle one for myself.
Thanks Tim – we are looking forward to it. Good luck getting one!
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[...] we are constantly improving our own touch-tables and have talked before about tech (like our Kinect) that reads gestures. 2012 might be the year we figure out a way to use this tech to create a lower cost option for [...]