A homebrew hacker named Joel Griffin Dodd has gone and done the possible—but still amazing—and combined the smartphone phenomenon Angry Birds with the Xbox Kinect motion capture peripheral. Now you too can freely use your hands in front of a TV screen to hurl ornery ornithopters at petulant porcines.

Perhaps you could get this hack installed and play the newest seasonal release of Angry Birds with your Valentine—give you one hell of an excuse to hold hands!

CNET Crave ran a short article along with a video of the experience last week,

The hack uses code from the KinEmote project, which Dodd helped develop, it’s a software suite that permits a mouse-control through hand gestures. In this case, it looks like “palm-clicking and drag” is on display—from what we can see it involves displaying a flat hand to the Kinect and closing the hand in order to “grab” a bird and opening it again to release.

A fitting gesture for drawing a bird back on a slingshot and letting it loose.

KinEmote provides an amazing suite of gesture control for mouse movement that is demoed as applied to a great deal of applications. We’ve seen others developed gesture support for a Minority Report-like interface and for adding gesture-based support to Google Chrome, but KinEmote provides one of the first API suites for coding for both of these sort of projects as an underlying library. There’s also a small, but thriving community built at its foundation. We may see the beginning of something beautiful here—as more libraries get developed for using the Kinect to provide basic architecture for gesture support and other applications we’ll see the development of more sophisticated hacks as garage coders start taking their ideas to the silicon drawing board.

(Somebody make that pig stop laughing at me. Hand me another bird!)