Motion Capture with Kinect

Apple remains shrouded in mystery while continuing to sweep up small companies ahead of a rumored augmented reality headset launch. On Friday, Apple confirmed the acquisition of a UK-based firm called iKinema, which specializes in 3D motion captures of human figures. Don't M ...more

Thanks to Project-Infrared, there's now a pretty straightforward way to add motion tracking to the HoloLens: Connect it to a Kinect. Wavelength LLC's created a way to get the Microsoft Kinect working as a motion-tracking input device for HoloLens, which my colleague Adam Dach ...more

Screw gaming, let's get to the serious stuff! Here's an amazing video of a Kinect hack that lets one see what its camera sees - in 3D. Instead of 2D images of motion capture, we get the full spatial view. Think of the "bullet time" effect in The Matrix (freeze, rotate, conti ...more

By now, you've probably already seen Andy Serkis and his performance capture demo for Magic Leap. And sure, marrying motion capture acting and augmented reality sounds compelling, but how does it really work as an experience? A few days ago, I had a chance to find out, thanks ...more

While 3D motion capture via iPhone X is coming soon from Unity, software maker Reallusion offers similar functionality to 3D model animation producers today. With CrazyTalk Animator 3, users can now add animation to virtually any image, bringing it to life with motion effects ...more

Like clockwork, Apple has unveiled the latest additions to its ARKit tookit at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where ARKit first said hello to the world in 2017, as well as some new tools that take a direct shot at Unity, Unreal Engine, and others. Coming to iOS 1 ...more

Sometimes, taking a picture of your friend doing a crazy stunt just doesn't suffice. Getting the progression of the stunt in one image does! Regular pictures can lack depth sometimes. Not only are they sometimes boring, but capturing someone midair or mid-anything is hard! Ba ...more

Turkey's been consumed, you've awakened from the food coma, and you've escaped the madness of Black Friday. Isn't it about time you tackle a new project? We've got some great new projects for you to help illuminate the darkness of winter. Make your own electroluminescent (EL) ...more

It's no surprise that the Microsoft Kinect can provide far better motion tracking than the HoloLens currently can on its own, but at least one developer didn't want to wait for the company's own eventual implementation. Kyle G, founder and CEO of Wavelength Studios, projected ...more

The world has been overflowing with Microsoft Kinect hacks, each more amazing than the last. The latest innovation, created by a group of engineers at USC, promises an exciting future in gaming (and gets gamers off their asses). The program is called FAAST, and allows for full ...more

When Microsoft unveiled Mesh a couple of weeks ago, the move revealed a major part of Microsoft's next steps toward dominating the augmented reality space, particularly with regard to enterprise customers. But aside from the general details contained in the announcement, what ...more

Nintendo's Wii Remote came close, but never has a video game peripheral garnered such adoration from the hacker community than the Kinect. Since the release of Microsoft's controller-free gaming device last November, there has literally been thousands of fun and useful projec ...more

Thanks to Microsoft’s XBOX 360 motion-detecting system, Kinect, the world is becoming a play place for sci-fi style virtual reality. One of the latest hacks demonstrates the next best thing to regular old air guitar... virtual reality air guitar: Artist Chris O'Shea explains h ...more

Even though the Kinect has been on the market for over a year, Microsoft's motion sensing device is far from old news. In fact, Microsoft announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that the Kinect for Windows hardware and accompanying software is finally arriving ...more

It's remarkable that a gaming device (from Microsoft, no less) designed for geeky gamers has incited broad innovation in medicine and robotics. But that Kinect has captured the imagination of hackers-with-MBAs-in-mind is downright amazing. Below, six videos demonstrating a va ...more

Facebook may have shamelessly copied Snapchat and its camera effects for faces (as well as its World Lenses), but it might beat its social media competitor to virtual body augmentation. The AI Camera Team at Facebook has developed a method for detecting body poses and separat ...more

Video games and art have somewhat of a sticky relationship. Many video games have large teams of talented artists doing amazingly creative work, and yet the art community is only just beginning to utilize video games as art (sometimes). Perhaps if video games were shown not ju ...more

Augmented reality seems to come into its own in museums, where audiences are ready and willing to try out new immersive tech. Now, that tech-powered palette is about to get a little larger. On Wednesday, the Knight Foundation announced grants that will allow five museums nati ...more

Over the last few years, the virtual reality space has earned a welcome reputation for fostering better representational balance with regard to gender compared to the general tech industry, with women like Nonny de la Peña and many others leading the charge. Comparatively, au ...more

Beginning in November, National Football League (NFL) fans visiting New York's Times Square can come as close as any civilian can to stepping onto a professional football field. All for less than the price of a pair of cleats. Today, the NFL unveiled details of the NFL Experi ...more

In response to Sony unveiling its own holographic display back in October, Looking Glass Factory CEO Shawn Frayne quickly penned a letter welcoming the electronics mainstay to the field, with a post-script teasing the reveal of their own for December of 2020. That day is fina ...more

It is almost indisputable that smartglasses and head-worn displays are the future of augmented reality. However, at this precise moment, they are still a very niche market. Those who have been in the presence of a HoloLens, Meta 2, or Magic Leap One have witnessed how powerfu ...more

If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?" Many of the top names in the industry from the 2018 edition remain the same, but their positions have shuffled. The p ...more

The year 2020 was a pivotal span of time during which the word "virtual" took on a brand new meaning. Instead of referring to VR or augmented reality, the term was hijacked to describe meeting across long distances through a variety of software tools, most often through video. ...more

There is an abstinence game being created by the University of Central Florida with $400k+ of taxpayer money. The game is directed at middle school girls to help them handle and cope with sexual advances. From the article: Fox News Orlando reports that the University of Cent ...more

Here's another cool hack using the Kinect, albeit one beyond the reach of most of us. Some students, staff, and professors at MIT have developed "hand detection" software using the Kinect's motion sensor. Below is a demonstration of this software. It recalls Tom Cruise's icon ...more

It's been a long time coming, but Microsoft has finally released a software development kit (SDK) for the Kinect on Windows 7 PCs. The word "hacking" is no longer needed, thanks to the free beta download available at Microsoft Research that allows anyone with a Windows compute ...more

Iowa firefighter Pete Lilja has modded the software of a Canon powershot to record images of Earth, from as high as 85,000 feet! Lilja's hack requires the following: 1 basic point-and-shoot consumer camera attach camera to a GPS transmitter (+ a phone number just in case the ...more

e3 Premieres the XBOX MotionCapture Add-on via Adam B. Vary at Entertainment Weekly Remember last year, e3's most hyped announcement was the XBOX that turned your whole body into a Wiimote? Is it all we dreamed it would be? Check out the review from EW.com insider. "After a ...more

Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills. Submit your best shot to our weekly competition for a chance to win an awes ...more

We've seen several examples of light graffiti on WonderHowTo (1, 2, 3), but this one is truly eerily beautiful. Australian photographer Denis Smith pushes the envelope with his project Ball of Light. "The Ball of Light is a mysterious portal into my world. It, and its friends ...more

In 2007, Nintendo introduced the world to motion control video games with the Wii. Microsoft and Sony built on Nintendo's phenomenal success and released their own motion control products for the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 late in 2010: the Kinect and the Move. The Move is bas ...more

I know I can't be the only person whose socks go missing in a shroud of mystery, but I'm determined to catch the sock-thieving gnomes in the act. While I have my suspicions, I can't quite prove it. Sure, I could drink a load of Red Bulls and never sleep, guarding my socks—but ...more

We already know that Magic Leap is working with Hollywood motion capture legend Andy Serkis on a new immersive content experience but, so far, all we've heard are descriptions of the work. Well, now the mystery is over, and the character of Grishneck, who Magic Leap mentioned ...more

After Apple unveiled ARKit 3 at WWDC on Monday, Unity Technologies wasted little time on ensuring its developers can take advantage of it. Earlier this week, Unity announced that AR Foundation, its cross-platform framework for building AR mobile apps that are compatible with ...more

The critics of Magic Leap have been circling for a couple of weeks now, but that isn't stopping the company from pushing forward with major new partnerships. The latest Magic Leap tie-up is with none other than motion capture actor Andy Serkis and his UK-based The Imaginarium ...more

On Tuesday, at the Unite Berlin developers conference, Unity unveiled new tools designed specifically for augmented reality that could literally raise the technology to the next level. Coming this fall, a new extension for Unity called Project MARS (short for Mixed and Augmen ...more

Like many things associated with Magic Leap, the start of the company's first annual L.E.A.P. conference got off to a unique start. Taking the stage on Wednesday morning in Los Angeles, the company's CEO, Rony Abovitz, gave a brief introductory speech welcoming the crowd and o ...more

The longest-running children's television show in the United States, Sesame Street, hasn't survived 50 years without leveraging new technology along the way. The latest innovation from the Sesame Street Workshop is Sesame Street Yourself, a new iOS app that takes advantage of ...more

As demonstrated by holographic experiences for the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap One, volumetric video capture is a key component of enabling the more realistic augmented reality experiences of the future. But the augmented reality industry is accelerating the technol ...more

While Leap Motion and Microsoft are looking to capture natural human motion with cameras, Enflux figured out how to do it with a shirt and pants that feel completely natural. Video: . Everyone's trying to figure out the best way to interact with virtual environments now that s ...more

Nowadays, our phones are capable of just more than 30 fps video. Phones like the Galaxy S10 can shoot 4K at 60 fps, even on the front camera. Slow motion functionality has recently started to appear on more and more devices — but as you may have noticed, the quality of the fea ...more

Augmented reality plays a key role in the evolution of adjacent technologies, such as 5G connectivity and brain-control interfaces (BCI), and the business news of the week serves up proof points for both examples. On the 5G front, Verizon's acquisition of Jaunt XR adds anothe ...more