If you were reading the internet at all this past April Fool’s Day you probably came across Google’s silly “Gmail Motion” prank where users could control their webmail interface via ridiculous gestures. You probably thought you were clever for deducing that it was indeed an April Fool’s joke and that there was probably no way someone would actually make such a thing.
Ah-ah-ah! Not so fast there, captain!
No motion-based computing challenge is too ridiculous for our friends over at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies who are at it again with their Microsoft Kinect hacks. They sent us word that they have successfully birthed “Gmail Motion” into life by using the Kinect to read your body motions and mapping them to Gmail functionality. Yes, now you can do all of the cool stuff in the above video demonstration like open your emails by pretending you are opening an envelope and send emails by “licking a stamp” and slapping your thigh.
Want to give it a shot? Download their FAAST mapping software here. (Warning: you may need to know what you are doing)
For the rest of us who are too lazy to figure out how to connect our Kinect to our PCs, feel free to check out the video proof below from USC:
