Control your lounge chair with the wave of an arm

JohnBoxall — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 06:01:26 +0000

If you have ever wanted to change rooms or move about from the comfort of your own lounge chair – now you can. Over at the Microsoft Developer network blog, Clint Rutkas has documented how the team extensively modified a lounge chair and created a motorised version that is controlled by hand gestures using the Xbox Kinect motion-sensing device – called the “Jellybean”.

To save time they used an existing lounge chair, and added it to a new frame containing the motors, four omni-directional wheels and the required hardware. The chair is then controlled by moving one’s hands about in front of the Kinect sensor which is mounted in front of the driver. For more information and a detailed look at the project, check out the following video:

Although this may seem like a frivolous project, and we may agree if it was only limited to a chair – it is a demonstration of what is possible using motion-sensing technology. Although the Kinect sensor was originally designed for console games, it can now be used for other purposes thanks to a competition launched previously by adafruit industries.

They sponsored a competition to support development of open-source Kinect code, and more has been created by the OpenKinect project (http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page). However for more information about this amazing chair, visit the project website here: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Jellybean-the-Kinect-Drivable-Lounge-Chair

Spring Rocket » Kinect

Control your lounge chair with the wave of an arm