You didn't think the enthusiasm for hacking the Kinect to make it do variously useful and silly things was going to end after two weeks,
did you? It's just going to get better, so let's recap with two of the
coolest new hacks. One makes you invisible, and one gives you the power
of a certain mustachioed plumber.
First off: invisibility, one of our favorite topics. Takayuki Fukatsu posted a video
showing the Kinect's "optical camouflage" he built with OpenFrameworks,
a widely-used open-source coding toolkit. He doesn't really describe
how it works, though it's a pretty safe bet that it's a simple-ish
filter that removes his body from the frame and replaces it with the
image behind it, taken beforehand. Of course, it's doing it in real
time, which is pretty impressive. (Note: The video is seven minutes long
and doesn't really have to be--you get the idea after a couple
minutes.)
