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.

Mega64 - Pizzatron

The guys at Mega64 really knocked it out of the park with this one, showing off just how excited gamers are about ordering pizza using the Kinect, which really pushes the level of gimmickry that we though possible with the device to all new highs. Microsoft and Pizza Hut teamed up to release this rather odd app last week for Xbox Live, which allows you to order pizza using hand motions and voice commands. Rocco perfectly emulates what most of us imagined ordering a pizza with a Kinect would feel like in this (As they put it) 'Tale of tragedy, famine, Pizza Hut, and Kinect.'

Unnamed Soundsculpture By Daniel Franke

The limits of the Kinect's unintended uses are explore again in this beautiful experimental piece by Daniel Franke. Using three Kinect's, Daniel recorded a dancer going through a routine before feeding the point data into a visualizer, adding sound distortion, random seeding of frames and post processing. The final performance is an uncanny visual spectacle, featuring a flowing form attempting to maintain a solid shape with every reset.