We’ve seen a pile of homebrew Kinect Hacks that take advantage of the figure- and gesture-detection capabilities built into the Kinect’s firmware—and now we’re seeing yet another implementation that takes advantage of that and takes it a step further by adding extra inputs.

Sebastian Pirch of 3rD-EYE has demoed a free-space 3D modeling tool that uses the Kinect camera to track his hands and set depth and spatial relation for his gestures and combines that with two Arduino-powered gloves (Arduino is a homebrew electronics/software platform for these sorts of projects.) The gloves fingertips have electrodes on them that can send signals to the computer and tell it which fingers are touching—something that the Kinect camera might have trouble determining if certain fingers are occluded from view.

The combination of gestures control with the fingertip touch-detection produces an extremely powerful modeling program.

A simple mesh modeler that uses KINECTs depth perception and homemade data gloves for a more real world oriented user interaction in virtual 3d space.

Realized only with open source software.

PURE DATA, GEM, OpenNI, UBUNTU.
First try, but already pretty useable and a fun to play with.

In the video he talks about how right now the gloves are wired to the system; but a step forward could use something like Bluetooth or another wireless foundation. The gesture-based elements of the design certainly remind me of the Minority Report style hack that delivers that user interface; but the real giant benefit from this is that it adds another artistic interface for 3d modelers to interface with their virtual worlds.

As we’ve seen before, the Kinect is a brilliant platform for 3D animators, its motion capture system enables homebrew character-animation from actual human movements. This used to be the stuff of well-funded, high-powered Hollywood FX studios and putting it in the hands of anyone with a PC and a video game console accessory can literally garage animate their own videos.

This only became cooler when a Chinese hacker tied the Kinect drivers into the popular 3D rendering program 3ds Max using OpenNI—same as the above hack—so we’re seeing what could be essentially be seen as an evolution along those lines of accessibility and user interfacing.

Next we’ll hopefully be seeing worlds built with these interfaces brought to home consoles and getting users to actually interact with them with cheap and highly available devices.