Kinect Controlled Skateboard Steered With Hand Gestures
The “Board of Awesomeness” is one of the most inventive Kinect hacks we’ve seen in a while. Developed by Chaotic Moon Labs, a zany team of engineers who managed to revolutionize and reconfigure the Microsoft Kinect, so it not only responds to movement, but correspond that movement to something other than a gaming avatar, this time a longboard skateboard. The device boasts video and speech recognition, an accelerometer, location data, and other factors to determine a rider’s next move. The Kinect transmits the rider’s movements to a voice-control-equipped Samsung Windows 8 tablet, which serves as the control center.
The top of the longboard features the tablet touchscreen, which turns the motorized board on and off, manages the slow, medium and fast speed settings, and monitors gestures. Here’s how the “Board of Awesomeness” is activated: the rider raises his/her hand forward and waits for the red dots from the Kinect. Other than that, pushing the hands forward signal the board to move faster, while pulling the hands back slows down the speed. Absolutely incredible, and a unique way of showing how perceptive computing can shift our expectations of user experiences.
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Kyana Gordon is a regular contributor to PSFK. She is also a writer, strategist, and DJ based in Brooklyn, New York. On Twitter, @DRohsnap is her name.
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