Kinect hacks have been used for many a grand feat, from a tool that helps the blind navigate more easily to hands-free questing in World of Warcraft and virtual cat brushing.

The Mirracle system projects a CT image onto the user's reflection to give the illusion of seeing inside one's own body.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)

So why not integrate the powers of Microsoft Kinect with a mirror to teach such subjects as basic anatomy?

For the past year, a team out of the Technical University of Munich in Germany has been working on just that. The researchers use Kinect to estimate the position of a person in front of an augmented-reality mirror in order to create the illusion that the user can see inside her own body.

Researchers Tobias Blum and Nassir Navab say the tool, which they call Mirracle--for "mirror miracle," I suppose--is largely educational, and report that they installed a prototype of their Mirracle system in the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam in September 2011.

The Kinect provides tracking, while software from OpenNI and PrimeSense NITE project the skeleton of... [Read more]

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