The Xbox Kinect camera-interface has been the center of a lot of amusing controversy lately and it’s also been the center of a groundswell of amazing innovations. The newest invention to leap out of this little-developed device produced by Microsoft has been a gesture-based navigation extension for the open source Chrome browser.

ReadWriteWeb brings us the scoop,

Called DepthJS, the software is on GitHub and open for collaboration… Some of the gestures appear more dramatic than I would want to use to navigate the Web with, but perhaps that will change in time. If a gesture-based interface could capture text input as well, that would be even cooler. Cursor motion alone, however, is all it takes to evoke a vision of the future in which Kinect-like devices are used to control all kinds of Web-connected devices.

The Kinect contains an entire suite of extremely useful drivers and other processing power for tracking movement in its field of view. With this sort of development we could see a low cost, open source Minority Report gesture interface cropping up. We would just simply have to combine the Kinect camera with a projector and a wall and viola, home-entertainment at its finest. A game could be projected onto the wall from one angle, the player could stand in front of it with the camera facing them, and gesticulate wildly at the “screen” for a huge amusement factor.

Why hasn’t Microsoft tried to leverage this yet? Perhaps they’re waiting for all the millions of homebrew hackers and hobbyists out there to come up with the idea and then they’ll market it themselves.

Meanwhile, enjoy the video.

DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.