Now that I realize I can quicklaunch the Kinect Fun Labs apps individually and do not have to go through the uncharacteristic lockups caused by the Fun Labs launcher app I am getting to see some more of the gadgets.
This one is called sparkler and its results are interesting. You draw in 3d on a backdrop that is made from a foreground and and a background shot. What is really great is this is using slightly more precision on the kinect. To draw you hold up two fingers as a pointer and stop drawing by clenching your fist. Up to now all games have treated your hands as dots at the end of your arms.
The video is very short but it is what is generates along with stills for sharing on Kinect Share.

I am waiting on my call for the next Marvel super hero film I can be g33kspark or something

E3 this year had some announcements about the Xbox and its Kinect. I was surprised that the Kinect Fun Labs arrived straight away on an update. These are a set of kinect toys and apps, many inspired by the open source pioneers who built applications with as part of kinect hacking.
The one I tried was Googly Eyes. You hold up any object and the kinect scans in the front, and then the back. It then processes for a few seconds and adds comedy googly eyes to give the object some character.
The thing on screen is then controlled by your body movements. So it is just a few seconds from static real life object to a virtual puppet. As you can see here is is one of elemming’s shoes dancing.

It is very well done, I a sure with the right lighting and object you can make things that are much more complicated.
There are another few apps and more on the way to show off advances in what kinect can do. There is also an avatar creator that makes an xbox style AV but that resembles you (something the nintendo 3DS does well too )
Very cool, very interesting and I will be exploring it some more.

I really enjoyed the chance to explain something really important on this weeks Cool Stuff Collective. The core of the piece this week was the principle of Open Source collaboration. I had started to lead up to this concept with the wikipedia piece a few weeks ago, showing the views that anyone can get involved can contribute and not just consume on the web.
The way to approach open source though had to be something other than the “traditional” software applications such as the Linux operating system. Whilst it is one of the most advanced and technically rich exemplars of the this self organisation and support eco system its really not compelling enough for kids.
The open source libraries for the Xbox Kinect however are spot on. It is a triumphant story of the explorers out there seeing what they could do with what is already an amazing piece of consumer technology. It being the big xmas hit only a few weeks ago most people can relate to it and what it does in the context of the Xbox. Many of the viewers will have played with one too.
The speed with which the open source community gathered and hacked the kinect, released the code and then people started gathering and building more and more things was so fast it highlights the speed disruptive innovation can side swipe large corporate entities. In the first few days of the hacking Microsoft took a “not with my box of bunnies” approach. Legal proceedings were threatened etc. Somewhere, somehow there was someone with enough sense to stand back and say… “wait a minute, at the very least this is selling even more kinects, people are buying kinects who don’t have xbox’s”. After all no harm was being done really, the kinect was not being stolen, it was not a DRM issue. The thing has a USB plug on it! Now it may have been all calculated to frown and them embrace the hacks but however it has worked out Microsoft come out pretty well having decided to join the party rather than stop it. Whilst not specifically part of the open source movement(s) they are releasing a home hacking kit.
The choice of how to work with your kinect on a computer is a varied one but just for the record (as we did not give any names/URLs out on the show)
I used (and hence was helping to support) the Libfreenect piece of software on my Mac. All the info you budding hackers need is at Openkinect.org
This let me show Sy the depth of field display running on a Mac. The left hand colour picture reflects distance, one of the key points of the Kinect in sensing movement over an above a regular webcam. I was not altering any code just showing what was available at its very basic level.

I also demoed the audio hack of a Theremin the Therenect by Martin Kaltenbrunner of the Interface Culture Lab. I bumped into this demo via a serendipitous conversation about what a theremin actually is and how it works just before putting this piece together. Martin is also one of the inventors of the ARTag and TUIO integrations that I used in the AR show in Unity3d and the brilliant Reactable that I hope will be in the final Big gadget adventure film towards the end of series 2. (So a friend of the show as his stuff just works whenever I try it!)
There are of course lots more things going on and so many good examples of people working on the kinext and hooking up other free and accessible pieces of code, and more importantly sharing them. @ceejay sent me this link on twitter after the show aired.

Hopefully next (and final record for the series) I will get to do the Opensim piece, more open source wonderfulness to build upon this and the previous conversations.
Many people are not aware just how complicated Open Source is as a concept and the implications it has as part of any eco system. It is a threat and an opportunity, a training ground for new skills, a hobby and a political minefield of ego’s, sub cultures, competing interests. What come out of the early days of Open Source is usually very rough, but it works. If it does not work quite right you change it and contribute back. We have yet to see the ultimate long term effects of open source in a networked world. We have though seen it make massive changes to the software industry, but the principles of gathering and sharing and building applies to way more that our geeky business. It is about governments, banks, manufacturing and even the legal system. It is, not to put too much pathos on this, the will of the people. (just not always the same people who consider themselves in charge or market leaders.)
Open source projects also tend to spring up in response to a popular commercial event, challenging windows with linux as an example. Without something big and unwieldy, or not done quite how people really want it done, an open source movement will not form with enough passion and gravitas. That is not to say that people do not realise lots of things as open source. You write code and share it, build and show etc, but that is open sourcing and not the complexity of an open source movement I think.
So, a heavy subject once you drill down but it is the future and its already here.
Open source is messy, it about people, it tends to not fit all the preconceptions of a product. However people tend to expect a product to work and be supported the same as if they paid for it. Which is why there actually is a financial and business opportunity in wrapping open source up, and providing labelled versions and services with appropriate licensing. The people that build still need to eat and be recognised for their work too. So it is by no means just a load of free stuff on the internet, but you are free to join in and I hope some kids will be inspired to at least take a look or ask their parents and teachers about the social implications of all this too.

For reasons that will become apparent in a few weeks time I needed to see if I could get my Mac to talk to the Kinect using the brilliant open source OpenKinect.org. I don’t do too much in the command shell on my Mac so the realms of Homebrew and MacPorts mentioned in the instructions, whilst I knew what the point of them is, meant that my machine was in a bit of a state.
I had used something call Fink a while back, but could not remember why so I tried the Homebrew instructions but failed and had too many paths and bits not very happy to take what is a ready made package. So instead I went to the MacPorts compile it yourself path.
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started.
The glview application then ran nicely and told me I had 0 kinects attached to my Mac
A prerequisite for this is to have the kinect with a power supply as opposed to bundled newer xbox and kinects where the power is built in. I simply took the Mac to the xbox, unplugged the USB from there and popped it into the Mac, ran glview again as a test. Bingo!


At its very basic mode you can see the colouring for depth being rendered as the predlets are nearer or further from the device.
Next step is to hook into the libraries and make sense of the data

I have really enjoyed the explosion of Kinect hacks that have taken place in such a short period of time since the release of the Kinect. The technology of the Kinect is fascinating in its own right (you can read more from the actual engineers here)
However its the consumer use of the device on easily accessible devices that really is driving things forward. Previously games hardware is locked away with preferred developers, its hard for ideas to happen anywhere other than in the studios. Here however we have people trying out all sorts of demonstration applications, some are sensible, some are mad but they all really help drive forward the product development.
Microsoft were initially saying they were unhappy at this, but I find that hard to believe in this day and age as giving things over to people to experiment and share globally is crowd sourcing at its best.

Not every demo gets released as an opensource piece of code but many of them are using an open source base and a commercial product with the Kinect.
In many ways this will expose more people to the concept of open source development. Let face it most people would not really grok the open source and sharing interaction that goes together to make software like Linux or Droid or even Opensim. However when video pop up os a device they have only just seen in the shops and may indeed have, doing things that are not sat on the shelves of game shops it becomes very real and prompts the question how are they doing that? Why are they doing that? Why are some people just giving away what they have done?
No doubt the games developers are looking at all the hacks and getting seeds of ideas or seeing things as proof of concepts that will drive even better kinect games.

Kinect and motion sensing is not the be all and end all of Human computer interaction but it does work well for youtube and vimeo demonstrations and pushes the world forward. Now if the Kinect had been locked down as Xbox only and not hacked in this way there would have only been about 20 kinect applications whilst we wait on the more polished production of the the games companies.
Standards exist already as can be seen from this article from the excellent Kinect Hacks site which is a great place to follow this trend.

The current Cool Stuff Collective show airing or Tx8 (of 13) as they call it in the trade features yet more great and cool gadgets and games. For me though the true star of the show was the Xbox Kinect. Having it set up in the studio and having had a little bit of time to look at it, seeing other peoples reactions to it it truly is one awesome piece of kit.
The show aired on Monday 1st November on CITV but you can see it on ITV this Saturday 6th on ITV1 9:25.

Being able to stand up and present this and explain it to Sy let me do my usual arm waving, what was great was that the avatar on the screen was obviously mirroring me as I occasionally stopped steering the boat with Sy in the and gesticulated to get the points across about how revolutionary this really is for commercial in the home technology.

Seeing the debug console earlier and all the points of the body and various cameras at work is a very surreal experience too. Obviously the games are about controlling an environment and immersion but the avatars responding to you is more about self reflection. You know its not you, its not really a video of you but a fully rigged puppet responding to you. This is much more engaging and emotive that I expected it to be.
Of course being The Cool Stuff Collective it cant all be serious philosophical points about the nature of self and existence.
So here is a picture of Monkey, Me and the Pop Crash Grannies Janice and Victoria as we have a joke sleepover party at the end of the show.

Yes that is a seagull flying past on the end of a fishing rod… oh I gave the secret away….
Yes we also had the introduction of Donkey to the show this week and the return of Cave Girl

Of course the irony/serendipity of working with Cave Girl who arrived on the show due to Monkey inventing a time machine that I helped him with, when my main presentations on the direction of virtual worlds and gaming technology is called washing away cave paintings really cant be ignored either. Its all linked you see
As is the whole Chicken suit in fable3 that I mentioned here

Here is to next week with yet more bizarreness.

Todays recording of The Cool Stuff Collective(this just went live showing some of the parts of the show online though only in the UK ) was probably the weirdest and funniest yet. For several reasons I think. The first is the pace and stride the production team at Archie Productions have got into and the building of jokes upon previous material etc. The second is those of us who are new to all this are more comfortable with the whole process and pace. So we have all found our voice. Another element was that one of the shows is the Halloween version, which is always good for a few odd experiences.
Where else would a pop crash grannie in a witches costume, a heavily pregnant make up guru and a tech geek spend time wrapping toilet roll around a long suffering show researcher to create a mummy gag? A fate later to befall another much loved character on the show this time with kitchen roll and gaffer tape too.

(There are some more behind the scenes photos in this set)
However for me the absolute highlight was being able to do my slot on the show on the Xbox Kinect. Having this set up on set at lunchtime meant trying it out a bit more. I got to see the development viewer for it (that we could not use on the show) that gave all the various sensor inputs and showed what the device was going, the points it was tracking etc.
We played Kinect adventures on the item and it performed really well. Everyone on the crew who had a look or a go just all said wow. November 10th cannot come too soon as I know the predlets are really going to enjoy this kit. Being able to not only sense you arms and legs and body movements but deal with depth and location in the room is simply amazing.
When players swap over or move into view the device knows its not the person who was there before. The recognition process takes hardly any time at all.
It is quite simply stunning.
Its not often I want a photo taken with a piece of kit, but in this case it was like a major celebrity turning up so I had to get a photo with it.

With the E3 conference in full swing bringing us heaps of great game announcements it is interesting to different rapidly emerging technologies start to combine and cause interesting opportunities and problems.
Project Natal from Microsoft has been renamed to Kinect. Its a soon to arrive add on to the 360 that does some very clever things to detect people and their body movements. It is way past the WiiMote, which Sony have gone closer too with their magic wand Move device (a glowing ball on a stick).

All the Kinect demos and release film showed variations of gameplay that require your entire body to be the controller for the game. In exercise, sports and dance games this makes a great deal of a difference. Knowing where limbs are rather than dance mats has great scope. Though it does lead to an ergonomic problem of needing space around you in your living room/games room.
In driving games such as Forza3 they showed how you sit with your arms outstretched holding an imaginary wheel. This looks like it will be painful, I suppose there is nothing to stop us holding on to some sort of device as I suspect prolonged play will get tricky. What is great is the head tracking though. Being able to look into a corner and the view changes.
There is also a leap and drive towards 3D. The TV’s are starting to appear in stores, Sky is broadcasting the world cup in 3D too. This again is interesting because of our need to have to wear overlay spectacles (in most cases at the moment) in order to experience the effect. Games are starting to be “3d enabled” or be built to take advantage of the 3D tv. So we have a slight crossover here. Kinetic relieves us of our controls, free to move about, but the TV is re-enforcing the need to sit in the right place and wear a device in order to experience it correctly.
So what happens when the large comfortable, easy fit glasses of passively watched 3d TV meet an energetic bounce around body controlled Kinetic game on the 360.

I am sure we will end up with a range of sports glasses and attachments to help play the various games, but it is something to think about.
I am really looking forward to the blend of 3d visuals with gesture controls and the creative process of building in virtual worlds, with the addition of being able to print out and create through 3d printers new peripherals to hold onto and enhance the experiences.
Exciting times!