How many of you remember growing up and wishing you could have a friend like Johnny (Number Five) from Short Circuit, a machine that has self-awareness, consciousness, and a friendly demeanor. What about K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider, a computer who cared about his partner Michael Knight and hardly felt artificial at all. Well, if you’re not that old, then how about WALL-E, that little guy surely rings a bell with everyone.
How you ask is any of this relevant to home servers, well after we reviewed Microsoft’s KINECT we had a brilliant idea of connecting it to our home server for some fantasy play.
First, as you can see from our pictures “SeeNect” as we named him resembles a not too distant cousin of Number 5, but enough with the family tree. It would be a neat idea if some day (soon) a KINECT like peripheral could be connected to the home server to provide both gesture and voice controls for the server.
The server could detect you and follow you (with its auto-adjustable cameras) all around the room and then perform any number of operations based on the taught gestures or vocal commands. So instead of saying “XBOX… play music”, you could be saying “Server…Perform Back-Up” , or “Server… install Grid Junction add-in.” Cool right… now if we can get Microsoft on board with this idea (after all it’s not like they have Drive Extender to work on … but we digress).
There is a hack to connect Kinect to Windows 7 already codelaboratories.com/nui
I do like your idea, but I see it more applied to my Media Center HTPC. Now that would be awesome!!. See in my case my home server is set in my basement with no real-person interaction rather than the virtual way (Dashboard) and I actually hate it when I need to go down and do physical work on it
. Anyways, with my Media Center, now that’s a different story.
I imagine browsing my menu with my hands or via voice commands, playing my TV shows and MediaBrowser movies, even a plugin to use kinect to call my xbox live friends over video!!….. I wonder how long I have to wait…..
Yes, downloaded the CL NUI Platform – Kinect Preview and it worked surprisingly well – very cool.
I agree with Media Center making a lot of sense and I think we will see some sort of Kinect Media Center Hack next year and another gesture sensor/peripheral should work with Media Center called” PrimeSense” =)
http://www.engadget.com/…/kinect-tech-destined-for-tv-embedded-greatness-in-2011-htpc-int