XBox Kinect Hack - 3D Room Scanning and Model Construction

We have been sitting back recently and watching the various XBox Kinect hacks with interest. It was only a matter of time - 3D room scanning and model construction:



I find it amazing that you can pop into your local retail outlet and purchase a 3D scanning device for £100. Created by Nicolas Burrus you can head over to his site and grab the Mac/PC/Linux code to try it out.

http://kinecthacks.net/ is also well worth a bookmark to keep up with the latest development.

Thanks go Marek from English Heritage for sending in the link.

XBox 360: Project Natal - Potential for Architectural and GeoVisualisation

Microsoft has announced the new Natal motion controller fro the XBox 360 at this years E3 conference. Natal is a small, device that sits underneath the screen and senors the users movement, completely eliminating the need for a controller.

This offers huge potential in the world of GIS/Urban visualisation, both in the professional realm and for communicating geography and architecture to a wider audience. Imagine a musuem based installation written for the XBox via the XDA displaying geospatial information that accepts both voice and movement commands.

Game engines and gaming devices offer a lot of potential for visualisation and simulation and with Natal that has just got more interesting.

Reclaim the Space: Xbox Gaming in the Urban Environment

We like the concept of using the urban environment as a projector screen to display media, which is why the team behind Urban XBox brought a smile to our face. The concept is simple, plan a route, park up the van (complete with custom myspace url on the side), plug in the projector and fire up the Xbox 360 to display the images on the side of buildings.

The movie below is well worth watching:


Urban Xbox 360 Gaming from UrbanXbox on Vimeo.

We know this is probably horribly against the law but wouldn't it be neat to play a session of GTA IV or Project Gotham on the side of a skyscraper?

Urban Xbox have a myspace page with more information: http://www.myspace.com/urbanxbox