"Kinectified"

A week ago, a friend of mine posted a link on my wall of an article about a new hack done on Microsoft's Kinect just hours after it was released. The article contained the same video shown in class last week and apparently, the guy who hacked it won a bounty of $3000 to whomever could give an open source driver for Kinect (according to the article anyway so I don't know if the guy really received the prize or not).

So as I was reading through the page I noticed a bunch of related articles and one of them had the title, "Kinectified PC ... not yet." (I kinda like that word, 'Kinectified.' Who knows, maybe a few years from now, it might be in the dictionary.) As the title suggests, it's about whether Microsoft will soon be adding the Kinect capability to the PC. It's possible but there are still a lot of problems to be taken care of: like how to cram all that hardware into the laptop, the expense, and even the problem of "Gorilla Arm Syndrome" where one's extended arms get tired after a long period of time.

So if not the PC, how about somewhere that's not meant for people to use personally... like a grocery store check-out? Will using the Kinect technology to recognize the items and charge them to your credit card as you walk out, work? How about instead of security cameras we have this technology to accurately recognize a person as he/she walks into the building? These ideas may be far-fetched and may be against the right to privacy (in some ways) but it's not entirely impossible. It's efficiency we're talking about here. However, with this, are we gonna lose yet another sector of job like the cashier? Solutions are being made in the name of technological advancement but new problems arise too. And with the speed we're going, it's hard to predict what's gonna happen next.