Creating 3D art has traditionally been done with cold apparatuses like a stylus, keyboard and mouse. Researchers at Purdue University are getting more personal by creating a device that will allow designers to mold their 3D images with their hands.

The tool is called Shape-It-Up. Using a Microsoft Kinect camera, it records the designer’s hand gestures, sends them through some custom computer algorithms and presto!  They’re working with their design in the tool’s virtual workspace using their hands.

The Shape-It-Up design tool is compatible with 3D printers, so the finished product can be materialized. “The conventional tools have non-intuitive and cognitively onerous processes requiring extensive training. We conclusively demonstrate the modeling of a wide variety of asymmetric 3-D shapes within a few seconds,” said Purdue’s Donald W. Feddersen Professor of Mechanical Engineering Karthik Ramani. We wonder how Michelangelo would have done in this medium.

The post Put Your Hands Up…and Use Them to Mold Some 3D Art first appeared on Gajitz.

Imagine walking past a clothing store only to see someone in the window of that store aping your every movement. You’d probably be a bit annoyed until you realized it was just a mannequin that had somehow managed to gain the power to move around. United Arrows, a Japanese clothing store, has introduced Marionettebot to the world.

Marionettebot is a mannequin attached to 16 wires and a specialized motor, which is how it is able to mimic the movements of passersby. The robotic mannequin “sees” through a Kinect camera and is then able to make movements similar to the humans walking by. Although the mannequin isn’t quite limber enough to be a perfect mirror to humans, it is rather effective at amusing those humans.

The post Doing the Robot: Marionette Mannequin Mimics Movements first appeared on Gajitz.

Pigeons may get a bad rap because of their dirtiness and their general propensity for being pests, but we’d still gladly take their ability to fly high above ground level. A new simulator developed by researchers at University College London’s Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) lets humans borrow the ability to fly just like a pigeon, if only for a brief time.

Using Google Earth and a Microsoft Kinect sensor, the simulator tracks body movements and translates them into bird navigational movements, allowing users to get a literal bird’s eye view of London. Flapping the arms like wings takes the user higher while dropping the arms causes a loss of altitude. Leaning to one side or the other changes the direction of the flight.

Although the simulator looks like great fun to use, the CASA team say that there is a practical purpose for it: it is part of a public outreach program to raise awareness of the college’s urban modeling work. That’s all well and good, but we aren’t nearly as interested in learning about their program as we are in taking the controls and cruising over London.

The post London Flight Simulator Gives You Temporary Ability to Fly first appeared on Gajitz.

We freely admit to an unhealthy dependence on Google to answer all of life’s questions. But Google has never been able to accurately answer questions like “Where did I leave my keys?” or “What happened to the TV remote?” A newly-developed system called Kinsight might be able to take care of those concerns in the near future. The concept was developed by Shahriar Nirjon and John Stankovic, both computer scientists at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. It operates on the assumption that objects in a home only change locations when humans pick them up and move them, so it tracks which objects humans cause to change location.

The system uses Microsoft Kinect cameras in every room to track items within a building. The items have to be programmed into the system and tagged before they can be followed, but then the system will keep track of where they are at all times. So the next time you misplace something, you can simply ask Kinsight where you absentmindedly set it down. The system will search its memory and come up with the last place that object was seen – and it’s accurate to within 5 inches. Not too shabby, especially if it can keep you from tearing apart the house in frustration.

The post Kinect’s Cameras Can Help Find Your Lost Household Stuff first appeared on Gajitz.

Even if you have model-like proportions, trying on clothes can be an irritating and stressful activity. Pushy salespeople and annoying fellow shoppers tend to put a damper on the whole experience. A California company called FaceCake has just made trying on clothes a lot more fun by letting you do it from the privacy of your own home, video-game style.

Using a setup built around the Microsoft Kinect and a live webcam feed, the Swivel system projects the user’s image onto his or her own screen. The available product categories appear in lists on the sides of the screen so customers can use hand gestures to select products that interest them.

The clothing, accessories and jewelry are digitally overlaid on the image of the customer. The items would fit realistically, taking the customer’s body shape into account. Shoppers can even turn around to see how clothes would look from the sides and change the on-screen background to see how the look would work in the real world.

Swivel will make recommendations on outfits and even let shoppers take snapshots of different looks to send to friends and family – because what guy doesn’t want to get a bunch of pictures of his girlfriend in 30 different virtual outfits?

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