![Kinect shaped up to play World of Warcraft with FAAST middleware [download]](https://static.digit.in/default/artImg75x64_5883.jpg "Kinect shaped up to play World of Warcraft with FAAST middleware [download]")
There’ve been plenty of Kinect hacks so far, and while this latest is probably not the most exciting, it does show the potential of the 3D motion sensor as a control interface for more conventional games, such as the popular MMORPG – World of Warcraft.
A team from the University of Southern California’s Institute of Creative Technologies has rigged up middleware it calls the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. FAAST will allow the Kinect to use the image data to create users’ skeleton patterns and assign gesture controls and body positions for regular mouse and keyboard actions; thus achieving “full-body control with games and VR applications.”
[RELATED_ARTICLE]The USC team has released FAAST, and it is free for non-commercial use. Applications envisioned by them are nobler than WoW though, with plans for rehabilitation and fitness programs. Future enhancements currently under development are: a wider range of pose and gesture sets, better training of user-defined gestures, real-time head tracking with RGB camera, virtual mouse and joystick emulators with GUI for mapping,
3D reconstruction / simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and even control of the Kinect swivel motor.
You can download the software here, and check out the Kinect WoW video below: