677/365 - Using the Kinect with FAAST to play Minesweeper

(testing OpenNI with the living room)

I spent a big chunk of the weekend bouncing around in front of the TV playing Kinect games, but the big reason I wanted one was for what you can do with it on the computer. There's a whole host of things out there since the Kinect went on sale, from shadow puppets to street mapping. What caught my interest was the application to desktop games. Specifically - MMOs.

(Chris posing with FAAST running)

So Chris and I spent about an hour fiddling with the Kinect. If you haven't taken a look at and read the page for the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton (FAAST) you should. It's awesome and easy to set up. You can see a lot of potential for this.

(Chris and I both using FAAST)

So first thing after getting everything installed (FAAST, drivers, etc) was to try out hands at minesweeper. It's a little different moving forward and backward to navigate on the board, but it works. Originally we had it so if you jumped you'd click the square, but since we're on the 3rd floor of an apartment this quickly got changed to hand waving.

Here's just a quick snippit of what we did to the bindings.txt file:

lean_left 15 key left_arrow
lean_right 15 key right_arrow
lean_forwards 20 key up_arrow
lean_backwards 20 key down_arrow
wave 0 key enter

Just add that to the action tab and hit start input emulation!

Next up is creating a more robust list of actions for LOTRO.