Since it first landed on the market, the Kinect’s potential has exceeded all expectations, transforming from a video game accessory into a bona fide medium for artistic creation. A number of artists have put to use the Kinect’s impressive motion sensor lens to create videos that exploit not only its original purpose, but also its many hiccups—namely, time delays, overexposure, pixelation and saturated or denatured colors. We recently made a selection of the best of these alternative hacker practices for the blog.Timothy Sherman and Paul Miller’s project, Magrathea, is quite literally otherworldly. A Kinect is used to recreate three dimensional digital landscapes from real life structures. The Kinect lens scans the surface of the structure, analyzes it and then creates, in real time, a map from it. The system, which uses openFrameworks and openGL, creates a texture made up of polygons, which it then covers with a variety of surfaces depending on the properties of the area—steep hills are thus transformed into rock, while flat surfaces become grassy planes. The landscapes can be generated using any and every type of material: cardboard, cubes, dough and even human bodies.While these early experiments are still rough around the edges, we’re excited to see the Kinect’s potential for creating real-time 3D digital environments and curious as to how these artists and programmers will continue developing and implementing that capability.
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Magrathea: Dynamic Landscapes Using Kinect
A program capable of transforming tangible structures into vast digital landscapes in real time.