Introducing Response’s Kinect + Bing Maps application

We have these fancy new 3D maps, like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. (It is actually so new that it is already being phased out…) We have the fancy new Kinect controller, which is the best selling consumer device – ever. What happens when the two are put together?

The first step on this road was taken by Joshua Blake. This blog post is about how my company, Response tackled the same problem. Note: we are building on Josh’s code. His code allowed us to display the Bing Maps 3D control in a WPF application, and his InputFilter.

While Josh’s work brings the multitouch gestures (pinch zoom, etc) to Kinect and WPF in general, we tried to create a more Kinect-like experience – where you are using your whole body to control the map.

I will have several blogposts on this project – how the maps are brought into WPF, how the “Places” UI was created using our Kinect WPF Toolkit, what kind of gestures we tried, what worked and what not, and what is the experience of a the four day exhibition where the application was shown off. To kick off the series of posts, here is a short video with one of our lovely assistants demoing the flight mode:

FYI: Kinect is connected to a PC, not an Xbox for this application.

Stay tuned!