World Of Warcraft Meets Kinect

WoW players get buff, are too busy raiding to exact revenge on bullies.

Being a nerd's nerd, I of course put in my time running the gamut of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) titles, culminating in a 20-odd hour a week part time job raiding in World of Warcraft. 40 of us would spend long evenings night after night trying to kill various and sundry monsters for loot. Needless to say, this wasn't a very healthy hobby.

Until now?

Wired.com recently reported a Kinect hack via OpenNI (an open source framework tool for Kinect) constructed by Evan Suma, a researcher at the University of Southern California and his team. It's called FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit), and it allows for basic commands and movement to be done via body motion and sound in the game.

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Being a nerd's nerd, I of course put in my time running the gamut of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) titles, culminating in a 20-odd hour a week part time job raiding in World of Warcraft. 40 of us would spend long evenings night after night trying to kill various and sundry monsters for loot. Needless to say, this wasn't a very healthy hobby.

Until now?

Wired.com recently reported a Kinect hack via OpenNI (an open source framework tool for Kinect) constructed by Evan Suma, a researcher at the University of Southern California and his team. It's called FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit), and it allows for basic commands and movement to be done via body motion and sound in the game.

While the current iteration allows for the most basic of commands to be sent to the game, (check out the video here) one can hope for something more intricate to come of this awesome creation. I'm not saying I want to step foot in Ragnaros' hallowed Core with 39 of my friends anytime soon (or ever again), but if I can't get a new generation of gamers away from their PC's with sordid tales of my raiding days, maybe I can support them by showing them that you can get excercise AND slay the dargon.

I think in some cases users will want to splurge on a really nice wireless headset with noise dampening tech, though. Why, you ask?

To mask the sounds of exercise induced heavy breathing.

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