A Microsoft Kinect hack lets World of Warcraft players cast spells, fight opponents and maneuver their characters using simple hand gestures and body movements.

Using Kinect and an open source framework tool called OpenNI, University of Southern California researcher Evan Suma and his team at the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies hacked together a middleware program called the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, or FAAST, which lets World of Warcraft players plug Kinect directly into their computers’ USB ports. Then the software translates real-world gestures into in-game commands, so players can level-grind with their fists.

“Our software communicates with the Kinect software and recognizes the user’s skeleton,” Suma said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “It calculates each gesture you do and generates virtual keyboard commands, allowing you to communicate through them.”

Off the shelf, Kinect uses cameras and a microphone to capture gamers’ movements and voice commands, translating the data and letting players skip the standard Xbox 360 controller. The promising peripheral has sold extremely well since its launch in early November, but some pundits have criticized the library of Kinect games, which focuses on casual titles. Third-party hacks like FAAST might open up more possibilities for deeper gaming using Kinect, whether applied to other PC games or to entirely new pieces of software.

In the demo video Suma and his team released this week (embedded above), the researcher shows off his implementation of FAAST in Warcraft. He uses his left hand to move the in-game camera, his right hand to select attack spells and his body to walk. The number of possible gestures is currently limited, but Suma says more will be available in coming weeks.

Since the FAAST software is open source, anyone can download it and play with its functions. This could open up all sorts of possibilities as programmers start using Kinect for other applications.

“People will be able to modify it and do things we’ve never thought of,” Suma said. “I’d love to see it used for completely different games.” (You can download FAAST, view the technical documentation and get other software needed to run the Kinect hack from the FAAST website.)

Will this sort of open source hack lead to a mainstream explosion? Jesse Divnich, vice president of analyst services for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, said he doesn’t think so.

“I don’t foresee these Kinect hacks ever making any entry into the mainstream market, nor do I see any of the big publishers/developers funding and commercially releasing any non-Xbox 360 Kinect games,” Divnich said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “The market is simply too small.”

But that doesn’t make them any less important.

“While 99 percent of these hacks will never be commercially successful, it simply just takes one out-of-the-box idea that could possibly drive an entirely new form of gameplay on the Xbox 360,” Divnich said. “Microsoft is aware that experimentation can often lead to the next big commercial success.”

Indeed, this hack could lead to a lot of phenomenal things. But is the keyboard-free and potentially laggy Kinect really ideal for a World of Warcraft player? At the highest levels of play, even a split second of reaction time could make a huge difference.

“We’re [currently] limited to a few commands, so I don’t think it’d be very good for something like [raiding],” Suma said. “But if you’re in casual play, at a basic level you can go around and do enough spells for common tasks. You can grind for leveling, go on quests … but this isn’t going to be a substitute for your keyboard and mouse.”

Third-party hacks are usually frowned upon in online games, and Warcraft maker Blizzard Entertainment is known for cracking down hard on people who modify its software.

The World of Warcraft terms of use prohibit “unauthorized third-party software designed to modify the World of Warcraft experience,” but Suma said he doesn’t think this hack will cause any problems — after all, it’s not like forsaking your mouse and keyboard can affect anyone else’s game. Blizzard did not respond when asked for comment on the hack.

Ultimately, FAAST’s ability to turn common movements into keyboard commands could revolutionize the way games are played and lead to medical and fitness applications, said Skip Rizzo of USC’s Institute of Creative Technlogies in the FAAST demo video.

“This opens up the doorway for building rehabilitation exercises for people after a stroke or traumatic brain injury,” Rizzo said. It could also help in the battle against childhood obesity and diabetes by getting young gamers “up and moving around, so they’re not just sitting, planted, playing with a gamepad all the time,” he said.

(Video via Geekword, as seen via @caseyjohnston)

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