I spy with my little eye…

What can you do with a Kinect? Next to playing with tigers and dancing in your living room of course. Well, not much really. Oh wait, you can play video’s without needing a controller. That’s it I guess… Naturally, people can think of numerous ways to use a device like this, or ‘hack it’ as they say. We already mentioned that people are trying to create realistic holograms with it. Well, I found something else today while browsing the web.

Some peeps over at The Technology Studio thought it would be cool to create an eye that follows you, a so called ‘wandering eye’. How did they do it? Well, using the OpenNI framework together with the Kinect’s depth camera they were able to create just this in a Pufferfish’s Puffersphere. Of course, an eye is just an eye. Nothing really fancy. So, being the nerds I believe they are, they transformed this eye into the awesome Eye of Sauron. Just to scare the people I guess.

The creators offers their code and a guide so you try it for yourself. You can run it without the sphere but a Kinect is essential. But who doesn’t have this wonderful piece of technology at home?

Check out the video of the Sauron version below. Also below that is the video of the slightly-less-creepy version of the regular eye. Even tough it’s freaky, I can’t help but to nitpick that the Sauron eye isn’t as accurate as the normal one. I think the problem lies with the image itself… But anyhow, it’s looks quite good… And now, I want one.