Microsoft has been bringing a lot of limelight to its motion-control Kinect hardware. In the past, the company has shown off how Kinect may be used in collaboration with Windows and now, Microsoft has revealed Kinect’s hand recognition, which looks quite impressive.
The company took the occasion of the TechFest event to show off this latest feature of Kinect. In demonstrating the newly-acquired hand-recognition capabilities of the hardware, a Microsoft personnel navigated, controlled and zoomed in on maps. The controls seem fairly smooth at times but slightly jittery at others, which kind of shows that the feature is still in development.
Interestingly, Kinect’s hand-recognition supports a whole lot of hand gestures. The company hopes that once it rolls out the updated SDK for Kinect in the coming weeks, developers will be able to build on this basic functionality and develop support for many new hand gestures.
For now, Microsoft hasn’t stated exactly what it envisions the future of Kinect’s hand-recognition capabilities to be. Naturally, the first thought that entered our head was that such a feature would be very ideal for gaming platforms. For instance, imagine playing your Xbox games merely with your hands, doing away with the whole point of using underwhelming controllers.
However, the company has stated that it has no plans of pushing out this new functionality to Xbox and for now, intends to equip Windows for Kinect with the new feature
Courtesy: The Verge
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