Microsoft Kinect Hackathon proves endless possibilities for the motion tracker

Recently Microsoft made the decision to consolidate the company’s Kinect hardware. Developers are now able to use an adaptor to help essentially with development cost. In addition to cost saving measures, Microsoft’s upcoming One-operating system play is also another enticement for Kinect developers. The idea of near future Kinect-based development that will expand beyond the Xbox One and niche business cases is becoming more and more a reality every day. The Kinect faithful are trusting that these new developments from Microsoft will finally spur the promised future the Kinect offered back in its initial release.

A collection of developers in London, this year did their best to help build that aspirational future we all saw from the Kinect so many years ago. Kinect Hack for Windows, the 36 hour coding endurance marathon, took place back on March 21 and 22. Coders focused on a day and half hackathon of the Kinect v2 sensor. More than 80 developers were gathered from the UK, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Mexico to spend a weekend creating some of most unique apps, games, tools, and resources for the Kinect. The event was by all accounts a success with large sales of ‘spectators’ tickets and a long list of new hacks and potential projects for the Kinect.

While the event was designed as a hackathon and not a direct competition, event organizer Dan Thomas of Moov2 with the help of US Kinect team, did put together prizes for more than two dozen Kinect developers. Check out the full list of Kinect projects created during the hackaton over at the source link below. Hopefully, we’ll see some of these make their way into our living rooms, Windows PCs, mobile phones and IoT soon, and hopefully they will entice even more developers to create new solutions with the Kinect sensor.