Kinect turns Google’s Gmail Motion April Fools joke into reality

Yesterday, Gmail users woke up to see Google’s exciting new Gmail Motion web mail. In Google’s demo video, it showed a webcam that could recognize body motions and hand gestures to trigger actions in Gmail. In my opinion, it sounded like a great idea. In reality, it was only an April Fools’ Day gag by the cunning jokesters at Google. Less than 24 hours later, a bunch of researchers who have dabbled in getting the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor to work with Windows applications has turned Gmail Motion from a joke into a real working product. Called SLOOW, short for Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving, the hack gives you all of Gmail Motion’s ridiculous gesture commands, including the “licking an envelope” to send an email and “pointing backwards” to reply to an email. From the video demo, it looks to be pretty awesome. If you’ve got a Kinect and this hack intrigues you, you can download it right here. Video of the working Gmail/Kinect motion mash-up after the jump.

Raymond Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: email, GMail, Google, Kinect, motion control