We finished part one of this series on NUI with Bill Gates demonstrating KinectFusion so I’ll pick the baton up from him on that topic.
Kinect has certainly driven a huge amount of interest inside and outside of Microsoft regarding NUI. That’s not to say that work in the wide field of NUI hasn’t been going on before Kinect – but the Xbox accessory has acted as a catalyst. The initial wave of excitement about the potential for Kinect took us by surprise but rather than seek to limit so called Kinect “hacks” we chose to embrace and encourage them and ultimately released an official SDK and version of Kinect that can be used with a PC – Kinect for Windows. It’d led to some amazing creations that I’ll cover in the next series.
That same level of enthusiasm for Kinect exists inside Microsoft – not least in Microsoft Research – who are toying with all kinds of NUI related project. The video below is a recent curation of just some of those projects
One team that has featured regularly on Next at Microsoft is the Applied Sciences Team led by Stevie Bathiche. They’re making extensive use of Kinect in their quest to build ‘the magic window’’. You can read the detail of their work in Microsoft Applied Sciences – building the ultimate display and hear a brilliant talk by Bathiche titled Breaking Harlow’s Monkeys.
In part 3, I’ll take a look at the projects outside of Microsoft that are using Kinect.
