Browse the Web With Your Bare Hands

The XBox 360 Kinect motion sensor took interactive gaming to a new level upon it's release. At the MIT Media Lab, the Fluid Interface group is looking to do for the keyboard and mouse what Kinect did for the gaming controller: get rid of it entirely. The team developed DepthJS, a software extension for Google Chrome that allows Javascript to talk to Microsoft's Kinect, allowing users to browse web pages by gesture alone.

Interactivity exhibited by the Kinect-Windows bridge is vaguely reminiscent of an earlier exploration into gestural technology, namely the more hands-on Microsoft Surface, which relied on the multi-touch technology we now, thanks to the iPad, consider commonplace.

Both multi-touch and motion capture technology have their pitfalls, but it'll be interesting to see how Microsoft might adapt both forms of user engagement into future products.

H/t Engadget.