News: The Revolution of the Hacked Kinect, Part 3: Gaming Gets Artsy

Video games and art have somewhat of a sticky relationship. Many video games have large teams of talented artists doing amazingly creative work, and yet the art community is only just beginning to utilize video games as art (sometimes). Perhaps if video games were shown not just as a medium of expression, but as a means of creating great art as well, the art community would be forced to consider it differently. The third part in the Hacked Kinect series will focus on the artistic possibilities now available.

Studio artists including animators, filmmakers, and computer programmers have been hard at work harnessing Kinect's 3D modeling abilities and gesture recognition. They have advanced the fields of 3D animation and motion capture in ways that could change the way movies and video games are made.

Just because the Kinect is a video game peripheral doesn't mean you have to be at home to use it. Some of the earliest and best Kinect hacks have involved musical and theatrical performance. The Kinect gives actors, musicians, dancers, magicians, and other stage performers the ability to manipulate stage lights, visualizations, music, and other multimedia aspects of their performance, using gestures from the stage that the Kinect picks up and translates into the appropriate action.

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