Playing WoW with Microsoft’s Kinect

Techies and gamers now have a reason to grab a Microsoft Kinect: FAAST. What the hell is FAAST? FAAST stands for Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit and is a project by the Institute for Creative Technologies and the USC School of Cinematic Arts to assign body movements to key bindings.

FAAST, which is available as a free download, is a research project that makes effective use of the Kinect sensors and stream the user’s skeleton over a network, which can then be used by special applications to emulate keyboard input.

FAAST can be configured for a lot of games, e.g. World of Warcraft. You can assign keys to special movements and then control the game via Kinect. Of course this is only a research project and not intended to be a full-fledged Kinect solution to play games. However, for techies this is the ultimate playground.

Download FAAST at http://people.ict.usc.edu/~suma/faast/

WoW with Kinect Video

Controlling Virtual Characters

You’ll find a couple more interesting videos on the project site. Good stuff!