Talk about a mega combination of potential awesome. A new video Hyperkin's product developer, Chris Gallizi, has appeared on YouTube showcasing the combination of the VR headset the Oculus Rift with Microsoft's Kinect, all taking place in the grand fantastic world of Skyrim.
With custom drivers designed to work with all three entities, Gallizi managed to put together a very impressive video showcase of utilizing magic in Skyrim with his hands, while also still having full IR head support so looking and moving around feels like it's actually taking place as if you're there.
While I know that Kinect gets a bad rep for all its pathetic casual shovelware, such as the abysmal Stars Wars Kinect, what we have here is an actual use for Kinect that actually improves the interactive experience. While I don't think you could completely play Skyrim hands-free, having a mix of controller and 3D movement tracking is a bit of an awesome feat, especially with the hands assigned to throwing magic around.
It's doubtful we'll see any of this applied during the first wave of commercial next generation Xbox or PlayStation games. However, if one product developer could make this kind of headway with just a little patience and a lot of fooling around, just imagine what a larger development studio with a full crew, bigger budget and an innovative idea could pull off? This also marks the second user modification including the Oculus Rift and Skyrim, with the first being the addons for Garry's Mod.
Oculus Rift devkits are currently available. You can also get the SDK for the Xbox Kinect for PC so you can exactly what you see in the video above (with some tweaking). I'm very interested to see what else comes of this sort of technology.
