Kinect’s Jazziest Hack Yet Puts a Piano Everywhere

A new Kinect hack will make anything into a piano, even a pet or an old dirty sock.

Just when Kinect hacks were starting to become passé, something has come out that should reinvigorate everyone’s interest. The OpenKinect Piano hack will literally put an instrument at your fingertips anywhere they happen to be. As long as a Kinect is around too, that is.

The hack is simple to explain. Point Kinect at something, and you can put a virtual piano keyboard there. This includes anything from your computer desk to the space shuttle.

OpenKinect Piano’s keyboard can be of any size, which allows its creators in the video to demonstrate playing with both their hands on a desk, and their feet on the floor. It’s really quite an ingenious piece of software.

Little did the creators of those giant keyboards from Big know that their work would someday be revived in completely invisible form by Kinect hackers. The real question is, can OpenKinect Piano put a piano on a piano? Yes, probably, but that’d defeat the point.

Combined with the Kinect air guitar hack, I think it’s pretty evident that we’ll see Kinect music games use the invisible instrument technique in the future. Maybe this kind of technology is what will bring back the music genre?