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Minority Report Style Web Browsing with the Kinect

Thanks to Kinect hacks and its controller-free interface, we will be using a lot more of our hands in the days to come. Of course, the “holy grail” of gesture recognition is how Tom Cruise interacts with a computer in Minority Report. Check out how a few engineers have gone about controlling web browsing with a Kinect controller and a Chrome browser extension.

Installing the browser extension on Chrome allows any web page to interact with the Microsoft Kinect. The Open Source extension is still in Alpha, but it’s still smooth enough for you to navigate tabs, scroll webpages, or pan and zoom. You can bet that these kinds of Kinect hacks are precursors of more projects to come. Some like the 3D video capture or the object recognition device using Kinect are rapidly pushing the barriers of what can be done with Microsoft’s latest toy.