Every year, Google has an April Fools gag, like a plan to print out your emails and send them to you, or unleashing an AI on the Internet to build a website (said AI has since invaded government servers). This year, it was a claim that there would be a new motion interface for Gmail called Gmail Motion.
Maybe it was actually a challenge, because the guys over at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies used a technology they’ve developed, the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), for, what else, the Kinect. They’ve already hooked up World of Warcraft to this thing, in a heroic bid to get that one guy in the guild to exercise for once.
Hooking it up to Gmail with what they call the Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving (get it?), they made Gmail Motion a reality. See for yourself…
[ via the jokesters at HackADay ]
