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Kinect To Be Used By NASA?

Posted by Ploppy McDougle from Swansea - Published on 04/01/2012 at 12:24
6 comments » - Tagged as Sport & Leisure, Technology

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Yn Gymraeg

Microsoft has made a cracker of a camera with the Kinect.

Usually used for the Xbox 360, the Kinect lets you become the controller. But just hours of its release, it was hacked by Linux programmer Hector Martin, and a world of possibilities with it.

One of the best features that I thought about is the fact that it can render 3D imagery onto your computer, not to mention other epic things that the Kinect has to offer.

But, it seems that there's something else that makes the Kinect something special in the world. And for this, my friends, we'll have to go to the International Space Station (ISS).

How come? Well, the sensors that are built into the camera have the capability to calculate their weight in zero gravity, which means that astronauts will soon be able to stay in shape while on missions.

And this is where I'd add an "omg" gif here if this were a Tumblr post.

Quick science lesson, folks. Every mission up in space will result in those participating losing up to 15 per cent of their body mass. Why? Basically, they don't use their muscles much. To prevent this, the crew spends two hours exercising a day up in the ISS.

It's rather hard to weigh the space people in orbit, since traditional scales don't work.

William Thornton, an American astronaut and doctor, partially solved the problem in 1965 with the use of oscillating springs. A similar device is used today, but the problem with this is that a lot of energy is needed to power the moving stool.

The thought of John Charles, chief scientist on NASA's human research programme in Houston, Texas, is that combining the idea of the Kinect with the current system of weighing could be good, since the Kinect measures body volume while the stool measures mass.

The idea came from Carmelo Velardo, a computer scientist at Eurecom in Alpes-Maritimes, France. With the help of colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology's Center for Human Space Robotics in Torino, Velardo used the Kinect to create a 3D image of the astronaut. They then did some rather lovely mathematical work, which in turn resulted in Velardo estimating that the results were 97 per cent accurate, with the average error of just 2.7 kilograms.

Due to the high cost of launching new equipment, the new system has not yet been tested in space, though Velardo hopes to conduct experiments aboard a parabolic aircraft flight that simulates microgravity found in orbit. He will produce the research at the ESPA (or the Emerging Signal Processing Applications) conference next month in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Please say that I'm not the only one who finds this interesting?

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Image - flickr in space by darkmatter