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Your Daily Kinect Hack: A Laser Sword

I've decided that I'm going to keep posting videos of Kinect hacks for as long as it takes Microsoft to publish a completely awesome game for their little motorised Eye of Sauron. I appreciate that this may be some time, but I've got a two litre carton of orange juice here. No danger.

Today, you can watch a man wielding a sword made entirely of light. It looks pretty cool, and even makes a sort of warbling noise.

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The star of the above video, a Mr. Yankeyan, he says:

"Proof of concept of tracking and rendering a lightsaber in real time using a Kinect hooked up to a PC. Imagine the possibilities.

Best viewed in fullscreen 480p. I track a wooden stick and I overlay the light glow on the computer. Drivers using OpenKinect, image processing, tracking, and rendering using OpenCV. Audio recorded and processed using Audacity and played using libao."

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Quintin Smith avatar
Quintin Smith: Quinns was one of the first writers to join Rock Paper Shotgun after its founding in 2007, and he stayed with the site until 2011 (though he carried on writing freelance articles well beyond that). These days, you can find him talking about tabletop board games over on Shut Up And Sit Down, or doing proper grown-up journalism with the folks at People Make Games.
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