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A group from the University of Southern California has created the coolest Xbox Kinect hack yet: gesture-based spell casting and controls for World of Warcraft.
USC's Institute for Creative Technologies has created and released FAAST, or the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. It's a middleware toolkit that helps integrate full-body motion controls for games via the Kinect's sensors. Essentially, ICT makes it possible to map full-body gestures to different keyboard commands.
A YouTube video demonstrating and explaining the technology has already generated more than 350,000 views. In it, an ICT team member demonstrates how its hack can target enemies, cast magic spells, control the camera and move across the World of Warcraft landscape using only body movements like leaning forward or moving the left hand side to side.
Currently FAAST is only available for Windows, but the Institute intends to develop a Linux version. It also plans to open-source the project so other developers can create more dynamic projects with the toolkit. The Institute hopes that FAAST will help open a whole new world of healthy gaming.