One of Google’s April Fools jokes, Gmail Motion, looks a lot less like a joke and a lot more like reality today. Members of the ICT MxR Lab at the University of Southern California have made their own gesture-based system for handling email. The prototype utilizes Kinect’s motion-sensing technology in order to send and receive email.
This isn’t the first Kinect hack from the ICT MxR Lab. The USC researchers built a prototype last year that allowed World of Warcraft to be played in full-body mode.
That project was called FAAST – Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. The Gmail motion hack revealed this weekend is called SLOOW – Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving. You can see how it works, along with the original Google joke, below.
As a witty commenter notes on the group’s YouTube page, maybe next year Google can say they’ve found a replacement for oil for April Fools, and enterprising scholars can hack together the “real” solution over the weekend in response.
