Microsoft’s Holodesk Project Is Like Star Trek…But Today…With A Kinect

You have to watch this video. There’s 3D interactions here and as soon as you see it you can start to think of a million ways this can be implemented. Not just in games and prototyping but also if you were triggering real time actions, like a surgeon for example. Here’s how they describe it:

HoloDesk is a novel interactive system combining an optical
see through display and Kinect camera to create the illusion
that users are directly interacting with 3D graphics. A virtual
image of a 3D scene is rendered through a half silvered mir-
ror and spatially aligned with the real-world for the viewer.
Users easily reach into an interaction volume displaying the
virtual image. This allows the user to literally get their hands
into the virtual display. A novel real-time algorithm for rep-
resenting hands and other physical objects, which are sensed
by the Kinect inside this volume, allows physically realistic
interaction between real and virtual 3D objects.

Kinect is the gift that keeps giving and if it leads to rapid prototyping of more Windows Phones, even better. Anyway, rally neat tech here and I presume as they increase the camera resolution and processing power of Kinect all of these little projects will get a huge boost.