Can Finger-Tracking Be Done With Kinect? How About A Standard Webcam? Why, Yes. Yes It Can.

Yes, I have proof that Kinect can do it, but first, lets talk about another tech. Just last month, there was an announcement from MIT researchers Robert Wang and Jovan Popovic of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, about a tech they had developed which tracks your hands and individual fingers, all with a simple webcam and some cheap Lycra gloves, which have been designed with a colorful pattern that allows the software to decipher their place in 3D space. I always knew that computers saw the world in '80s-vision! I mean, those gloves tell it like it is.

Rest of the story + videos after the jump:








So, now that Microsoft has invested so much into Kinect, you are probably wondering where they could fit in, when recent tech can do it so easy with any webcam and a pair of stretchy gloves costing under $2. Well, it certainly can be done with a camera like Natal, and actually already has been done using a Wii remote hack from none other than the Internet geek legend, Johnny Lee... who now works for Microsoft... and has been working on Kinect. Make sense? Good.






It must be said that although this is obviously not Kinect, and Johnny used a Wii remote, the combination of infrared LEDs and IR sensor remains virtually the same idea of how the depth sensor portion works on Kinect. Of course, I believe that Microsoft will have to come up with something a bit more mainstream than bits of reflective tape on the finger tips of Kinect users. I just thought that it should be cleared up that this can for 100% sure, be done. Not only that, but it can be done without Kinect's amazing skeletal system software that Microsoft spent so much resources on.