In which we discuss ansilary things

I read an article today regarding a PhD student who was doing his project on writing recognition/tracking software that uses an ordinary camera and his open source software. Over the last several months there has been a lot of talk in the Maker Community regarding Microsoft's Kinect hardware and all the nifty applications it can have. Mostly in the space of full body tracking and motion tracking. The implications for this kind of ability in computers is pretty impressive. Anywhere from intefacing with your pc, ala Minority Report, to interfacing with your house, where you wave your hand in a particular manner and the light comes on. The big issue in using Kinect is that you had to have the hardware. Microsoft actually did a good job in building the hardware and making the source code accessible and configurable so the hacker community could, you know, hack it. But you still had to buy the Kinect camera. With what this PhD student did, his software does much the same kind of tracking, but uses the video camera you already have and his algorithm is open source and free. Sweet. Now, the implications for our little 'bot project are kinda cool. If, I say IF, we can get to the point where we've got a running robot, it's possible, by putting linux on an old box and modding it into the R2 unit, and then by placing a camera into the eye or periscope of the R2 unit, to have the robot do some things based on visual cues. That, my friends, would be cool.