Kinect was an ambitious project from the start, so it’s good to see that Microsoft is following through by continuing to support the device and doling out more functionality. One of the big steps was the release of Kinect for Windows, which allowed a whole new crowd of would-be developers take a crack at the hardware, and now they’ll have a new thing to take a crack at. After an SDK update, Kinect now has facial-tracking capabilities, so it’ll be able to tell if you’re enjoying playing with it.
From the Microsoft Kinect for Windows blog post on the subject:
Face Tracking Capabilities
Makes it possible to fit a 3D mesh to users’ faces and track their facial features and head position in real time using components from the Developer Toolkit. In addition, newly added joint orientation information for skeletons is ideal for avatar animation scenarios and simple pose detection.
This really goes to show how much potential the Kinect has outside of being shackled to the Xbox. Surely someone will find something fun to do with this functionality. We’ll just have to sit back and wait for the resulting video to go viral.
(via Gizmodo)
