The Kinect Powered Manga Creator

Another pretty damn cool use of the Kinect, created by some truly fun folks at Shirai Lab following the success of the Manga-Camera app (You've probably seen at least a few people post their creations on Facebook), which allowed you to turn any photo into an over the top frame from a manga. Using a mixture of clever pen and ink shaders and some on the fly compositing, this fun experimental application turns you into the protagonist. Practical application? Who knows, but it looks like these guys had fun creating it.

For a story created in advance, you take up your desired pose. Then, the shader runs in real time, converting the image to manga style. The biggest feature of this system is, it observes a person’s posture, chooses a background to match, and synthesizes the two. The real-time manga shader still has room for improvement, so we’re working to enhance the image quality. Then, there’s the issue of layout. We’ve made great progress on layout with text in the right places, and interactive stories. Some aspects of this research can be applied to e-books and interactive e-books.