[by Robert Archer]
When Microsoft released the Kinect hands-free accessory the gaming community applauded the company’s latest gaming product.
Techies outside of the gaming community are also embracing the device for reasons beyond gaming activities. The website gmanews.tv is reporting that Microsoft’s Kinect was recently hacked by a University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill professor and student to run as a 3D video conferencing tool.
UNC graduate student Andrew Maimone says the 3D video conferencing system utilizes the Kinect’s depth cameras along with some algorithms and filters to create a 3D video conferencing solution. “Our system is affordable and reproducible; [it] offers the opportunity to easily deliver 3D telepresence beyond the researchers lab,” reports gmanews.tv.
Maimone’s comments were pulled from an abstract he wrote that describes the methodology that was used to develop the 3D video conferencing system.
The system’s algorithm is said to merge data between multiple depth cameras and it will work with color calibration techniques, as well as technologies that perserve stereo images with low data rendering rates.
In addition to these technologies, Maimone also presents a Kinect-based markerless tracking system that combines 2D eye-recognition with depth content to enable head-tracked stereoscopic views to be produced for a parallax barrier autostereoscopic display.
The Philippines-oriented website adds that UNC’s hack of the Kinect is not the first time the Kinect has been compromised. According to gmanews.tv, a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students hacked the gaming accessory to “enhance” distance-based Internet communications.
See the original post here: http://www.explore3dtv.com/blog/entry/20708/Microsoft-Kinect-Hacked-for-3D-Video-Conferencing-Use/