Now this goes beyond
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cool - to wit:

….If you’re a Second Life player, you know how cumbersome the keyboard and mouse feel when you’re trying to move around that virtual world, interact with others and construct stuff. Second Life creator chairman and designer of groundbreaking spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3 Mitch Kapor is experimenting with a new hands-free way to interact with the game using a clever 3D camera and complex motion-tracking software.

Using technology that can determine where your arms and legs are located in 3D space, the software can also detect your facial expressions, translating that into corresponding actions on your in-game avatar. Just like navigating a Segway, leaning forward, backward or from side to side steers you around, and there’s also a group of gestures for flying. Maybe this smooth tech, when it’s someday cost-effective, will convince more of those people who are signed up for Second Life but not playing to join in the virtual fun….MORE….

CNET also has an article about it at Linden Lab demos hands-free interface for Second Life.

This has been in creation now for only several months…..can you imagine the developments that will emerge? I found the blog of the developer too - he write:

…That’s what we’re trying to create. I’m hacking the open source slviewer and implementing different ways to interact with SL (navigate, change camera focus, initiate animations, interact with objects) without ever having to learn those weird and complicated navigation keyboard sequences (Alt-zooming anyone?) and, above all, allowing users to naturally interact in world without having to do everything with one single pointer (the mouse) and a handful of keystrokes.

To do so, we started exploring the use of new “3D” cameras, those capturing not only RGB but also depth or distance to the camera for each pixel. This makes the tracking of body features in real time much easier than simple “2D” cameras. In the first weeks of working on it, I was able to hack enough into the slviewer code to plug in a camera and start interacting within SL without the use of the keyboard. Things started working “for real” 2 weeks ago and Mitch got a little excited and spilled the beans at the Metaverse Roadmap meeting in Stanford ….MORE….

‘Way nice. There are some truly brilliant folk out there.

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

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ps - here’s a video of it:

pps - and speaking of hands-free:

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