"But still that voice nags away: "Is it a game?" The question, in the end, proves laughably redundant. Ask my daughter if she's playing a game and she'll look at you like you're an idiot (I get this look a lot) because of course she's playing a game. What else would you call it? The difference is, it's a game on her terms and, crucially, it's a game that takes place in her head, for the most part." As suspected, Happy Action Theatre sounds brilliant. More toys, please.

Depth-camera (Kinect) output streamed to webgl over websockets. Gorgeous to watch, snappy to manipulate.

"Nine hours in, with no end to the fetching and photographing and fishing and flower-watering in sight, I suggested to one of my nieces, who was playing the game with me (the whole thing's drop-in co-op friendly), that maybe collecting three pepper pots to make Monstro the Whale sneeze was not so very different to collecting three sets of banners for the Toon Town election. It turns out that, from the perspective of a six-year-old, it's entirely different, and I clearly understand little about whales and even less about elections." A marvellous, marvellous piece of writing from Christian (again).

"Every once in a while a video comes along which requires no comment at all. This is That Video." G1 JOCKEY!!!

"Synapse is an app for Mac and Windows that allows you to easily use your Kinect to control Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, Max/MSP, and any other application that can receive OSC events. It sends joint positions and hit events via OSC, and also sends the depth image into Quartz Composer. In a way, this allows you to use your whole body as an instrument." Oooh. OSC into anything; really nice, dead simple, and exactly the sort of thing I've been considering poking.

This is lovely: Lucier translated to the physical from the sonic; making rooms from previous rooms.

"I wonder if the use of the calibration pose will fade to the point where it becomes retro, included only by nostalgic programmers who that want to create that old 11-bit flavor of early depth cameras in their apps. Will we eventually learn to accommodate ourselves to a world where we’re invisibly tracked and take it for granted. Will the pose fall away in favor of new metaphors and protocols that are native to the new interface world slowly coming into existence?"

"I’m excited to announce that I’ve been contracted by O’Reilly to write a book about the Microsoft Kinect. The book is tentatively titled Making Things See: Computer Vision with the Microsoft Kinect, Processing, and Arduino. My goal is to introduce users to working with the Kinect’s depth camera and skeleton tracking abilities in their own projects and also to put those abilities in the wider context of the fields of gestural interfaces, 3D scanning, computer animation, and robotics." Nice. Joining this stuff together is *hard*, and getting it into the hands of designers, rather than programmers, is very important.

"This is all very preliminary, but here is a first pass as a Processing Kinect library." Ooh.