Air guitar hero with Kinect

IT'S AIR GUITAR HERO now with Microsoft's Kinect, thanks to an enthusiast who clearly knows how to have a good time.

The creator, a chap called Chris O'Shea, has shown off his home brew invisible guitar toy in a video, which is impressive and never makes him look silly, at all. Never.

The software uses the Kinect camera to follow hand and arm movements which are then superimposed over a virtual guitar. The software is written in C++ and uses Openframeworks and OpenCV for image processing. But it is limited by its lack of 3D full skeletal tracking, which O'Shea said was common on all XBox Kinect games. So, he admits, it is not perfect.

"My hand tracking is a simple first attempt, its quite inaccurate and a bit flaky. You also have to face the camera in quite a specific way," he explained. "Also in terms of sound it is very simple chords, and of course is no replacement for a real guitar.

Perfect or not, the air guitar makes a lot of Kinect sense. In theory it sounds like the perfect tool for the XBox Guitar Hero games. But, then it would do away with the need for consumers to buy expensive peripheral guitars and that would be altruistic madness. O'Shea suggested in his blog post that he was only doing it for kicks anyway.

"I am making this to experiment with the Kinect and full body interaction. I've no plans to attempt to bring this to market in any way," he explained. "I am sure there are companies out there doing this already." Well, if there are not, there are now.

There is no Stairway to Heaven played in the video, but O'Shea manages to perform some convincing sounds and make guitar noises by strumming with one hand and sliding the other up and down an invisible neck to create chords. A trick that worked for the Ramones for years. µ