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Using Kinect, MIT Media Lab pulls off gesture-based web browsing, with more on the horizon

By Rain Noe - January 11, 2011

in Tech

Whoa-ho! Depth JS, an open-source project run by a quartet of MIT Media Lab guys, has successfully connected Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing technology with Javascript. What does this mean to you and I? It means actual gesture-based web browsing (and eventually, more):

DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.

Nuts, no?

As the aforementioned quartet (Aaron Zinman, Doug Fritz, Greg Elliott, and Roy Shilkrot) explain, this is just an early first step and there's plenty more to come:

Navigating the web is only one application of the framework we built - that is, we envision all sorts of applications that run in the browser, from games to specific utilities for specific sites. The great part is that now web developers who specialize in Javascript can work with the Kinect without having to learn any special languages or code. We believe this will allow a new set of interactions beyond what we first developed.

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JD

14 years ago

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What would it take to get the camera to recognize less exaggerated gestures, and minimize the margin of error?
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kai yu

14 years ago

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I would rather use mouse to browse the internet, this kind of interaction is definitely sucks in the field.
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