Sometimes, making an April Fools joke can come back to bite you. Such is the case of Google’s Gmail Motion service and researches at
University of Southern California.
In
Google’s Gmail Motion "service", the company introduced a touchless way to control the Gmail user interface. While this may look odd to a world that is increasingly going multi-touch, there are users with disabilities that might even benefit from the technology - should it become viable. Naturally, clicking on the "Get the Gmail Motion" revealed that it was nothing else than April Fools joke.
However, researchers at
Institute for Creative Technologies over at University of Southern California decided to show Google who is the boss in their own game. ICT's team gathered around Evan A. Suma gathered the attention of world media when they demonstrated their FAAST (
Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit) library to
play World of Warcraft using Microsoft Kinect and OpenNI API. This time around, they recompiled FAAST into SLOOW (Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving) and made Google Gmail Motion a reality.
To cut the story short, you can see the video here:
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