It seems everybody is crazy about the Xbox Kinect, the little camera that attaches to the Microsoft video game console that turns your body’s movements into the mechanism for controlling a game.
Of course, the Kinect is fun, but it’s also invited hackers to use the device in unorthodox ways.
MIT researchers, for example, demonstrated recently that the Kinect, with a few accessories, can create a three-dimensional hologram of a person in real time.
The brains at the MIT Media Lab hooked a Kinect up to a laptop, which then beamed the imput — a woman dressed as Princess Leia from the famous “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi” scene — to a trio of off-the-shelf graphics processors, which created the hologram.
Check out the video below and read the MIT news story for the details of how it was done.