XBox Kinect Hack - 3D Room Scanning and Model Construction

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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

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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

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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

Visualising Geographic Environments: City 17

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Professor Ifan Shepherd of the University of Middlesex and Lestyn D Bleasdale-Shepherd of Valve presented an interesting talk at the International Conference on Developments in Visualization and Virtual Environments in Geographic Information Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on the use of haptic feedback devices and games and their implications for virtual geographic environments.

Of note was the number of games begin developed on the XBox 360 based around Microsoft's Virtual Earth. We will have more on this over the coming days, it is looking like Virtual Earth will be the one to watch in the next six to twelve months with some notable developments due.




The use of the Xbox controller in games such as Half Life, based around City 17 and embedded above, opens up a whole new way to provide feedback to the user when visualising geographic information. Perhaps in the next 5 years we will be using games consoles more and more as machines geared towards both research and visualisation in the geographical sciences?

A higher resolution version of the movie can be downloaded here (wmv, 33Mb)