Kinect hacks get all surgical and hadouken

Kinect hacks are all the range since the device was released, and today, two new ones have popped up online: one performing a virtual surgery, and the other mixed hadouken with a projector.

The first one (via Kotaku) was created by a group of engineering students at the University of Washington, and the hack uses Kinect to control surgical robots.

"For robotics-assisted surgeries, the surgeon has no sense of touch right now," said Howard Chizeck, UW professor of electrical engineering. "What we're doing is using that sense of touch to give information to the surgeon, like ‘You don't want to go here'".

The University of Washington students developed a software which allows Kinect to make three dimensional maps of the body, and allows for force feedback during robotic surgeons. It's honestly rather interesting, and according to the student, much cheaper than their original idea of using a CT scanner instead of Kinect.

Today's second hack (via Joystiq) is from a fella named Elliot Woods who has used Kinect to map a three-dimensional space for some righteous hadouken made from a "virtual dynamic light source casting light on the room's real objects to create virtual shadows on the surfaces that stick out," according to Engadget.

Watch Elliot's videos through here in case the description above confused you a bit.