Remember the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise, playing Chief John Anderton, interfaces with a computer just using his hands? Well, some researchers at MIT are using the Microsoft Kinect to do the same thing. Pretty cool.

This is a graphical interface inspired by the movie “Minority Report”. It uses the Kinect sensor from Microsoft, and the recently released libfreenect driver for interfacing with the Kinect in linux. The graphical interface and the hand detection software were written at MIT to interface with the open source robotics package ‘ROS’, developed by Willow Garage (willowgarage.com). The hand detection software showcases the abilities of the Point Cloud Library (PCL), a part of ROS that MIT has been helping to optimize. The hand detection software is able to distinguish hands and fingers in a cloud of more than 60,000 points at 30 frames per second, allowing natural, real time interaction.

Code available at:
http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect
http://www.ros.org/wiki/mit-ros-pkg

Work done by CSAIL’s LIS Group (http://lis.csail.mit.edu/) and Robot Locomotion Group (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/­)

via : Kinect Hand Detection