(Video Link)
Last year, we featured artist Chris O'Shea's giant human-crushing hand projected onto a public screen. One of his more recent projects was to hack the Xbox Kinect gaming platform so that it can play an air guitar:
First it thresholds the scene to find a person, then uses a histogram to get the most likely depth of a person in the scene. Then any pixels closer than the person to the camera are possible hands. It also uses contour extremity finding on the person blob to look for hands in situations where your hand is at the same depth as your body. It only works if you are facing the camera front on. Then it uses one hand as the neck of the guitar, drawing a virtual line from the neck through the person centroid to create the guitar line. The other hand is tracked to see if it passes through this line, strumming the guitar. The neck hand position controls the chord.
http://www.chrisoshea.org/lab/air-guitar-prototype via CrunchGear
Flexibility of customisation makes a product worth buying. I remember back when the ID Software's network was hacked, and the source code for Quake was distributed across the net. They were worried that there would be clones of the game all over and they would loose revenue. What they didn't expect was modifications of their game to be made by fans, expanding it without them having to lift a finger, and profits soared. Unfortunately many years later after churning out mediocrity they lost their fan base and were bought out by a larger game company, but sometimes you just gotta let the consumers take the reigns and make it into the product they want. It would be interesting to see if they release developer tools for people to do their own thing, but it's looking like they don't really need to.
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That never happened, Gauldar. Id released the source code to Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 intentionally. Each was released after they'd already moved on to their next gen of tech.
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Really? Hmm, I guess that's what I get for relying on a 15 year old memory... or at least what I thought was a memory.
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I think you are talking about Valve. They were hacked before Half Life 2 was released.
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