Helloooo HoloDesk! Take a look at this nifty new Kinect-powered gadget from Microsoft that lets you manipulate 3-D virtual images with your hands.
From Steve Clayton of Next at Microsoft Blog:
My favorite is Holodesk, a research project out of the Sensors and Devices group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I won’t attempt to describe what it does in great detail, except to say that with Holodesk you can manipulate 3-D, virtual images with your hands. Whilst this is only a research project at this stage, I can envisage future applications in areas such as board gaming, rapid prototype design or perhaps even telepresence, where users would share a single 3D scene viewed from different perspectives. I know it sounds very Star Trek but this is not science fiction.
For the record, the Holodesk isn’t the only 3-D interaction experiment out there. But what sets it apart from the rest is the use of beam-splitters and a graphic processing algorithm, which work together to provide a more life-like experience. The video provides a much better explanation, so I’ll leave the explanation at that.
Link - via Techcrunch