The Twelve Best Kinect Hacks Of 2010

Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson at design-io used openFrameworks and libFreenect to mod the Kinect into an arm-tracking shadow puppet toy. It only took them a day to build this. (CrunchGear)

Michael Schweitzer and Michael Himmelsbach at the University of Bundeswehr Munich connected a Kinect to a little robot car and programmed it to steer itself. Make it bigger and have it drive us to work. (Engadget)

Patrick Bouffard at UC Berkeley mounted a Kinect on a quadrocopter to make it navigate autonomously, because making quadrotor helicopters more similar to the manhacks from Half Life 2 is a fantastic idea. Seriously though, stop that. (Engadget)

Ihar99 also mounted a Kinect on a quadrocopter. This one detects gestures telling it which direction to move. Until it becomes self-aware and starts disobeying its orders, of course. (KinectHacks)

Yankeyan used OpenKinect drivers and OpenCV to make a lightsaber appear on the video in place of the wooden rod he’s swinging around. Unfortunately, he didn’t channel his inner Ghyslain Raza to bust some sweet moves. (Technabob)

Here’s another hack from the same guy who did the lightsaber on the previous page. For this one, he had the Kinect translate his jumping around, running in place, etc. into controller commands for playing Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s irritating to watch — like watching grandparents do a google search — but I’m glad it exists. (Technabob)