RIT Students Create Kinect@RIT—Website for Kinect Developers

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Kinect@RIT is a portal that provides users with a searchable database of community development projects, “starter docs” and tutorials across multiple operating systems and platforms.

Students from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Student Innovation and the game design and development graduate program in the School of Interactive Games and Media have created Kinect@RIT, a portal that provides users with a searchable database of community development projects, “starter docs” and tutorials across multiple operating systems and platforms. In addition, Kinect@RIT provides historical information on gestural and motion-based interfaces for games and a glossary of gestures and a library of design guidelines for developers.

Kinect is a camera-based Microsoft product that was designed to allow users of the Xbox 360 game console to play games with gestures and body movements instead of a physical controller. The device is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device.

A community of professional and amateur technologists around the world was hacking Kinect to work with computers within days of its launch for unique animation, robotics control, 3-D imaging applications and more. Microsoft shortly thereafter authorized community efforts to link Kinect to PCs and other computers.

On May 16, Microsoft is expected to release an official software development toolkit to encourage experimenters to use Kinect with various personal computers. The Kinect@RIT portal will support Microsoft’s package as well. The portal is at the Kinect@RIT website.

A “Kinectapalooza 0.1” event will take place in the Center for Student Innovation on the RIT campus from 12:15 to 2:15 p.m. May 16. The event is free and open to the public.

Students from the graduate course Emerging Technologies in Entertainment Computing will be on hand to give demonstrations of their class projects. All the student projects began with a goal of improving upon hobbyist and open source technology. Some of the work includes Google Earth and Google Maps fly-throughs, board games over the Internet, a virtual “dressing room” and a gestural building blocks system.

RIT alumni who work for Microsoft held prominent roles in the creation and production of Kinect and its games.

To learn more go to the School of Interactive Games and Media website.