Microsoft’s Kinect gaming peripheral is still getting its most impressive usage outside of the gaming sphere it was originally designed for. The latest example is one delivered by Microsoft themselves.
Microsoft Research have uploaded a video to YouTube (below) that demonstrates a new multitouch function for the motion-sensing peripheral that could have some very interesting uses when paired with the Windows 8 operating system. Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 is only capable of tracking a user’s skeleton, representing their hands as a single point. This is obviously a bit limited but researcher Cem Keskin has shown off what looks to be a standard current-generation Kinect running in a Windows environment that is capable to reading the user’s hand in two states, open or closed.
The slight body-tracking upgrade allows for multitouch control over Windows based around a series of simple hand gestures and could be a pointer towards whatever the company has in mind for its long-rumoured Kinect 2.0 system. Rather than just presenting their new hardware as a gaming peripheral however, this video might also indicate that Redmond has plans to bring it more into the desktop computing space as well. Those sci-fi motion-controlled 3D environments that Tony Stark has all to himself for the moment might not be that far off.
Source: PopSci