Qt Gets Kinect-Enabled With Air Cursor
Another interesting Kinect-based experiment has come to light. It is interesting how most of the exciting applications for this gaming device are those that have nothing to do with gaming at all!
This new open source project enables you to control Qt applications via gestures captured by the Kinect device. With Kinect as an input device you can move your hards about in the air to control a cursor, and use gestures to perform operations such as clicking, dragging and dropping. The project is quite appropriately named Air Cursor.
You can see a video of this technology in action, being used to drag and drop items around in an HTML5 application:
While touchscreens have become popular on small form-factor devices such as phones and tablets, they are still mostly unheard of on even laptops and certainly not desktops. There is good reason for this of course, an it isn’t as much a technology issue — being unable to manufacture touchscreens that large — but a practicality issue. On small devices performing gestures is simple, but imaging moving windows across on a large 24″ screen. It would be exhausting after using it for even a short while. Now imagine if you had to change the channel on your TV by swiping your hard across the screen.
Kinect on the other hand can let you perform gestures for simple operations using your hands but without needing contact with the screen.
What kind of compelling UIs will be developed around this technology we will only know once it has been around for a while. Microsoft has tied Kinect heavily to its gaming platform, so much so that the PC SDK we more of an afterthough. While Kinect has sold well, it hasn’t done as well for the games that support it. Hopefully this will not discourage Microsoft from continuing to develop this technology.