Kinect Hacked To Work With World Of Warcraft

World of Warcraft, the popular MMO game

The most exciting thing happens when you pair up one of the most exciting devices of the year, Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing peripheral, with one of the leading games in the world with a large user base, World of Warcraft. You get to see a person controlling a character in the popular MMO game with gestures.

If you read the news frequently, you may have heard of how hacked and modified the Kinect was since its release. People got it to work with computers and much more. A group from the University of Southern California came up with something quite nice for gamers, gesture-based spell casting and controls for World of Warcraft.

The creation is called FAAST for short, which stands for Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. It’s a toolkit which allows the integration of full-body motion controls for various games through Kinect’s sensors, according to Mashable. The main idea is that you can attribute full-body gestures to various keyboard commands. As you can tell from the video included in this article, the person controlling the frost mage in World of Warcraft has no problem with moving around, casting several spells and targeting crocodiles to attack them. For the time being this hack will only allow basic commands, so people would generally be restricted only to a bunch of spells.

Knowing how at maximum level a character in World of Warcraft typically has over two dozen abilities (some of which you might not use as often but you’ll eventually need to use anyway), this could complicate things for players if they are to stick to gaming through the Kinect. On the other hand, this is an exceptionally good start and we hope that the people from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies will improve this in the near future. Right now FAAST is only available for Windows but soon it will be released for Linux as well. The Institute also plans to open-source the project to allow other developers to create more dynamic projects with the toolkit.  If all goes well this toolkit will change the way gaming works. As explained in the video, World of Warcraft is one of the best games the Institute could’ve used for this project. That’s because a large number of people spend a lot of hours each day on this game. The main goal is to convince them to get up from their chairs, drop their controllers, keyboards and mice and actually move. This will eventually lead to an overall healthier gaming experience. It could prove more fun as well. WOW could be called a RPG with a whole lot of players because at the bottom of it all that’s the gender it fits in, in terms of gameplay. What better way to experience a RPG than to actually move to control your character and feel as if you’re in his/her shoes?

The YouTube Video we’ve shown you is getting pretty popular and has already recorded over 350,000 views. The ITC member called Evan A. Suma featured in it basically shows people how he can target enemies, cast spells, control the camera and explore the region around him strictly through body movement. Leaning forward will result in movement. Leaning backward will cause the character to move backward as well. So far, it’s pretty easy to understand and do. To turn the camera, all Suma has to do is move the left hand from side to side. To target something he’ll have to reach forward and grab, which, you know, is pretty intuitive overall. Different attack spells will be triggered by moving the right hand in various directions.

Reportedly future versions of FAAST will support a wider variety of gestures which will lead to more sophisticated game interactions. So when this will eventually become available in a more complex form, parents might be able to convince their kids to play, at least for an hour every day, with their Kinect. Why is this so great? First off, those kids can still do what they like and continue to play World of Warcraft, which by the way is a very addictive game that you have trouble giving up when you get into it. Secondly, to actually play the game those kids will have to move. That can easily be considered exercise and it’s a good way to prevent obesity and keep our friendly horde and alliance members fit and healthy. Maybe in the near future we’ll learn to control our games in completely different ways and we won’t have to rely on mice, keyboards and standard console controllers anymore. Do you think the idea of controlling most games with gestures and movement is a good one or do you relatively enjoy sitting down on your chair and buttoning away for hours on end?