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Google Street View eat your heart out: An MIT-built quadrocopter uses Microsoft Kinect, and some smart odometry algorithms, to fly around a room and spit out a 3D map of the environment. The drone itself is a lightweight UAV with four rotors, an antenna, protective and stabilising shielding and the guts of a Kinect sensor. It communicates with a nearby ...

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As Kinect hacks go, this one’s not going to bowl you over with its technical complexity, but the effect of what it does is quite dramatic. One of Microsoft’s sensor-rich, camera-laden Xbox accessories has been repurposed to communicate with a Pufferfish spherical projection display — via the magic of WPF and openni — with its motion tracking algorithms serving to control the image on the giant ball. Naturally, the first thing the tweakers behind this mod thought up was a Tolkien-inspired eye that follows people around the room. Sadly, the single Kinect box isn’t enough to provide 360-degree coverage, but it’s probably just a matter of time until they splice an array of them together and creep us out completely. Video after the break.

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