In another example of people finding interesting uses for Kinect outside of games computer scientists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have created a program that uses the camera to keep track of household objects. Shahriar Nirjon and colleague John Stankovic use Kinect cameras in each room of the house and lets them track people and objects as they move from room to room.

By following the location of objects over time, Kinsight can even distinguish between two identical-looking things – if it records a mug that seems to have jumped from the living room to the kitchen without passing through the space between, for example, it knows it is likely to be two mugs. The system can locate fist-sized objects with an accuracy of 13 centimetres.

Users will need to manually tag items in the program to make them searchable and trackable by name. Once tagged the program will be able to cross check items against its cataloged inventory.

[via New Scientist] [img]