Why the Kinect Matters
The Kinect announces a revolution in technology akin to those that shaped the most fundamental breakthroughs of the 20th century. Just like the premiere of the personal computer or the Internet, the release of the Kinect was another moment when the fruit of billions of dollars and decades of research that had previously only been available to the military and the intelligence community fell into the hands of regular people.
Face recognition, gait analysis, skeletonization, depth imaging—this cohort of technologies that had been developed to detect terrorists in public spaces could now suddenly be used for creative civilian purposes: building gestural interfaces for software, building cheap 3D scanners for personalized fabrication, ...