Microsoft’s Kinect offers exciting opportunities for digital artists, it has made previously expensive technology such as motion capture and 3D scanning accessible, paving the way for creative implementations.

After being demonstrated both the motion capture and 3D scanning aspects of the device and various pieces of software available to enable and utilise this we were eager to see what we could come up with.

After borrowing one of the Kinects the first thing we tried was using the new Kinect support for the sandbox game Garry’s Mod which had been added the previous day. With it we were able to control a character in the game in real time and with the character interact with objects within the game. Using the projector in the ‘Dat Cave’ made it easy for the person standing in front of the Kinect to see how their movements were appearing. As well as trying different movements we experimented with kicking and pushing objects.

After experimenting with direct representation based mainly on the motion capture aspect of the Kinect we later experimented with Processing.