Kinect Lightsaber Hack Is Quite Cool

With the open-source Kinect drivers released, it shouldn’t be too surprising to see various non-official uses for the Kinect suface and we’ve already seen the motion-sensing controller being used in a Minority Report-style photo manipulation. The possibilities are endless, but whenever the subject of a lightsaber crops up, you can bet that folks will zoom in on it. In this scenario, the OpenKinect drivers were used to come up with a real-time lightsaber effect on the computer. All the user needed to do was pick up a wooden stick and the Kinect tracks its position and the image processing software adds the lightsaber effect. You can check out a video of this in action after the jump, after which you’ll need to decide whether you want to be a Jedi or Sith (hint: red lightsabers are cooler).