MIX11 Fun: Controlling a hover drone with Surface & Kinect

News
By
last updated

At one of the talks today at MIX11, the focus was Natural User Interfaces (NUI) and their future. A lot of the talk was philosophical but there were also some cool demos of things not yet seen.

One of them was the use of a Surface 2.0 interface for a hover drone. Sure it has nothing to do with Windows Phones, but we're suckers for awesome gadgetry. Basically the Surface became the controller and it worked quite well. Next, was perhaps even cooler as the same hover drone was controlled via full body motion with the Kinect SDK. While perhaps not very practical, it goes to show how powerful NUI can be even for awesome remote controlled helicopter thingys. Sorry about the volume, can't help those things. (And yes, we want to be Jedis)

CATEGORIES
Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.