Today’s featured Kinect hack is called “Kinect to Vanish” and uses what the developer calls “a quirk in the Microsoft Kinect” which is then exploited to create depth image manipulations:
“The quirk which we explored in Kinect was based on its limitation of having a minimum range for the depth camera. It meant that skeleton tracking would not work on any of these object which is too close to the Kinect. The way we used it was to create occlusion in path of the user, so that part of his/her body could not be tracked, and correspondingly no RGB pixels were shown on the screen, effectively the part of the user so covered was invisible on the screen.
“A second person using their hand close to the Kinect could manipulate how much of the other person’s body is visible. Even the user themselves could come close to the camera and in this process have their bodies gradually disappear, or even make portions of their body disappear using their own hand.”
Simply put, the guys have come up with a creative and potentially fun use for one of the Kinect’s limitations; their hack allows you to make an object “disappear” from the screen with just the wave of a hand. The end result is undoubtedly cool and could be used for a variety of effects for any video projects that people out there may have.
To learn more, be sure to check out the Kinect to Vanish project page at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction design using the link we’ve provided below.