As if you didn’t already look impressive enough playing World of Warcraft on your computer, the big wigs over at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies just developed a hack, using the Xbox Kinect device, that allows for gesture-based controls and spell casting within WoW. Think Star Wars Kid meets the Nintendo Wii, only with more magic.
The team released a middleware toolkit called FAAST, or the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. Basically it allows the Kinect’s sensor to map motion controls and then communicate that information to keyboard commands. At the moment, the team has only finished a version that works with Windows, but hope to release a Linux edition sometime in the near future.
In this early version of the hack, users can control their player by leaning forward or backwards, spell cast using their right arm and also move the camera with their left. After the jump is a video of the hack in action and can someone please pay special attention at the 2:31 mark for me? This guy comes on camera named Skip Rizzo -who, for the life of me, I can’t tell whether or not has a ponytail. Can anyone help me out here? It’s bugging the sh*t out of me for some reason.
Special thanks to Mashable for the tip.