This is a truly spooky use of the Kinect and augmented reality. You can actually see inside a person's body just as if you were wearing x-ray specs.

While it is true that you could fill a news stream with nothing but stories of what people are using the Kinect for - this particular use deserves a special mention.

You may have seen ads for see-through x-ray specs that let you get a view of what lies beneath clothing without having to install an airport scanner - well now you can use a Kinect for the same job, sort of.

The idea is very simple and it seems to be a specific expression of a very general trend to use the Kinect to implement augmented reality. The Kinect can be used to track the position of a user and then the software can overlay some graphics to provided the augmented reality. In this case the graphics are taken from a CT body scan. The result is that you have a "magic" window into the body so that you can see what lies inside.

Of course this doesn't mean that you can see the inside of the body of the user in front of the input device - the body parts are images from another body altogether, i.e. the one that the CT scan was taken from - and so this is in no way an x-ray device.

What is, however, is very spooky and a great aid to educating people about what is under their skin. It might even evolve into a medical visualisation aid allowing doctors to view a CT scan in context. Who knows if this would be useful?

The project is being created by a team at TU München and it is in a very early stage of development.

More Information

TU München

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