I practically died when I seen this one. Dan Thyer set up a Netduino operated garden hose which is controlled by a program that uses a servo to change the direction of the hose. By pushing a button, he's able to have the hose continuously spray water in a pattern which machos the inner lining of his pool.

He's also able to manually take over by using a kinect which uses it's skeletal tracking abilities to precisely control where the hose is directed. He can essentially sit on his porch and blast water at anyone in the pool with a fair amount of accuracy.

Security "enthusiasts" may not be too thrilled about this latest example of Stefan's Candescent NUI project, but I'm sure they'd all agree how bad ass it is. The visual representation of the interface is so futuristic looking, you just can't help but love it!

This is what I like to see. A crisp, clean, seamless user interface with accompanying code for us all to try out! If you skip past my boring ass synopsis and go straight to the video, you'll be treated to one of the slickest video manipulation programs using a natural user interface to date. You heard right folks, this demo is a thing of beauty.

If you haven't heard or seen anything relating to Chris Vik's work, now's a good time to start catching up. His YouTube page should give just the right amount of background info and be warned, your mind may be blown in the process. Go here - http://www.youtube.com/user/synaecide - run, don't walk.

When I first heard about Shopper Tracker, I batted the idea of posting it around like a cat with a dead mouse. The concept sounds great, but the technical details weren't quite there to back it up. I just assumed it was either fake or that developers wanted to keep their secretes close to the chest. An understandable stance, especially during initial beta testing and early proof of concept demos. I continued to think about the video and kept struggling with the idea of how they'd actually capture the analytics.

One of the original founders of the OpenKinect community, Joshua Blake, has been hard at work, toiling in his secret gesture recognition laboratory hidden somewhere deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Now I'm not sure about the validity of that previous statement, but that's how I envision where really smart people go to do their best work. Anyway, I popped by the OpenKinect Google Groups page and noticed that Mr. Blake posted something very interesting the other week.

Not much to say here aside from the fact that you can do some really great work using a kinect with Unity. If anything this is just a showcase piece in terms of what you can achieve in Unity with a Kinect sensor. The fact that the model is able to pick up boxes makes it seem as if the Unity Kinect wrapper example Skeleton was used as a base model and was improved upon significantly.

I stumbled across a great presentation touching on the future of development in terms of the latest generation of coders and programmers. The lecture was done by Stephen Howell, the developer of Kinect2Scratch, a wrapper designed to add Kinect integration to MIT's scratch programming toolkit. I've never heard of kinect2scratch -- or Scratch for that matter -- up until now, but after listening to Stephen's lecture, I wanted to learn more.

Accessibility is one of the most exciting and practical uses of a Kinect sensor. Forget about using the 3D depth sensing camera for games, videos or performing arts -- although they are pretty damn cool. Let's focus on making the world a better place using technology. Jeff Kiske and Eric Berdinis are two such visionaries who have developed a system to help the blind navigate around with a little added assurance thanks to the Kinect.

Ryan Challinor, creator of Synapse for Kinect, has developed another great little side project in his free time. This time around he's created a Kinect controlled BeatWheel that controls a looping sample by using gestures to play the track normally or in reverse. You'll need to download the Max patch and the Synapse for Kinect application for Mac in order to try it out for your self.