Kinect 'hack': German researcher adds Kinect support to multitouch framework

Stephen Withers
Monday, 15 November 2010 07:49

Your IT - Entertainment

Efforts to make Microsoft's Kinect controller for the Xbox 360 more widely useful have taken a big step forward with the addition of Kinect support in a cross-platform multitouch interface toolkit.

TISCH (Tangible Information Surfaces for Collaboration between Humans) is a cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X) framework for multitouch interfaces. It includes a hardware-independent gesture recognition engine, and supports a selection of hardware devices including the Wiimote, DiamondTouch, and - since last weekend - Kinect.

Earlier this month, people started getting excited when 'AlexP', an administrator of the NUI Group Community Forums, posted a message including a video clip apparently showing the Kinect's camera-angle motor operating under the control of a PC running Windows, and its accelerometer being read.

It appears that Florian Echtler - a researcher at the Munich University of Applied Science and leader of the TISCH project - has got much further. Dr Echtler has posted a "proof-of-concept HD video" on YouTube showing the use of a Kinect to control a photo browser.

The demo, running on Ubuntu, also uses the libfreenect open source Kinect driver released last week by Hector Martin. The video shows the use of gestures to move, rotate and resize photos.

"I thought I'd get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done so it's out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things," joked Dr Echtler in a comment attached to the video.

In related news, libfreenect has been ported to Mac OS X by Theo Watson.