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Kinect Can't Just Read Your Motions, It Can Capture Them Too

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We've already seen one way Microsoft's Kinect can be used to help bedroom game developers, but here's another, just as practical way: it can allow for home-grown motion capture.

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For professionals, motion-capture work is time-consuming, highly specialised and expensive. Indeed, it's one of the big reasons Rockstar's LA Noire has been so long in development.

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This Kinect hack, though, makes it a relative breeze, cutting out those lycra suits, turning Kinect's own motion-recognition powers in on itself and using them to generate animated models. It taps into professional mo-cap software MotionBuilder and just dumps all the data right in there, in real-time.

You may not get results worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, but if all you want to do is have some basic characters or models looking more realistic - whether for a game or even just animated project - this could do the trick (provided the creator sees fit to continue working on the project, at any rate!).

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Realtime Kinect skeleton device for MotionBuilder [thanks Geoff!]