Tag: Kinect

News

Fru might actually make the Kinect relevant again

New Xbox One exclusive game, FRU requires players to use the Kinect to play. That, in itself, is already strange, considering the Kinect was unbundled from the Xbox One two years ago. But FRU might actually be able to bring life back to the Kinect by doing motion controls in a completely different way. While many motion control games require the player to, in some way, imitate a natural movement, FRU doesn’t. Instead, FRU uses the outline of your body to demarcate portals on the screen. These then change the environment that the in-game character is in, granting them a way…
Feature

How VR will change the way we create

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. The advent of the internet created a whole new mode of self-expression, from digital and gif art to fan-fiction and fan art. Now, new virtual reality (VR) tools are primed to inspire yet another era of creators, both amateur and professional, by inviting them to step into their own inventions. Nowhere—so far—is the medium’s artistic possibilities more evident than in Tilt Brush, Google’s VR painting app that launched on the HTC Vive in April. “Combined with the newest generation of motion controllers and input technology, VR has the potential to be…
News

UCLA and Kinect just made sandboxes so much cooler

When I was a kid, I had a small plastic sandbox on my patio in the shape of a turtle. It came with a little turtle shell cover to keep the sand clean and safe when I wasn’t playing with it, but looking back on it as an adult, that stuff still probably wasn’t all that sanitary. Still, it was always one of my favorite things to play with as a child, even if it annoyed my parents, and I’m guessing I wasn’t alone in that. It could never quite replace the joy I got from videogames, but sometimes you…
News

Watch this guy have an out-of-body-experience with three Kinects and an Oculus Rift

Microsoft might be revising their vision for the Kinect by removing it from the Xbox One, but the motion-tracking camera still has a bright future in creating spooky, immaterial OOB experiences, apparently.  As you can see in this reality-splitting YouTube video, a long-time VR developer has concocted a way to put a projection of his real body inside of virtual reality via three first-generation Kinects and an Oculus Rift, naturally. And the results are fascinating, even if his shadow self looks a bit squiggly and low-rent. You can see the incorporeal form of Oliver Kreylos waving its digital hands before…
News

Amazing VR experiment turns your living room into an interdimensional drawing app

Crazy things happen when you combine a Kinect with an Oculus Rift, like drawing with your finger in thin air and watching shapes that defy the laws of nature levitate over your living room set. As we can see in this fever dream of a video clip, programmer Matt Guertin has invented a mind-bending 3D drawing tool for virtual reality.  The setup he concocted allows him to quickly sketch shapes that are visible from all sides, making a convincing illustration of how virtual reality could one day give all kinds of digital objects and images the same physical dimensions in…
News

This Kinect installation turns normal human beings into freaky flower gods

Le Vent Nous Portera, or The Wind Will Carry Us, is an absolutely wonderful Kinect installation that takes you to a surreal forest with a billion stars in the open sky where you masquerade as a mud-person who casts glowing hydrangeas from your palms. It’s like the moment right before you die after your life flashes before your eyes, without the actual dying part.  This luminous forest scene of two moonlighting pagan gods was engineered and designed by Alexander Letcius and Bulat Sharipov of the art collective TUNDRA from Saint Petersburg, who seem to specialize in creating surreal audiovisual mind-fucks,…