Portal 2 Fan Dumps Mouse for Kinect Hack

This article is over 13 years old and may contain outdated information

Toss that mouse into an incinerator, you won’t be needing it anymore.

Yesterday we discovered that you don’t actually need portals to succeed in Portal 2 and today it looks like you don’t need a controller either. That’s assuming, of course, you’ve got a Kinect sensor and you’ve hacked it to work with you PC.

YouTube user “cooleybrad08” hooked up his Kinect to his PC, and used the FAAST middleware to map various button presses to gestures. The controls seem pretty simple: Chell moves forward and back based on where the player’s foot is, strafes when the player leans left and right, and jumps when the player raises his or her left foot. The player controls the mouse with his or her right hand, firing blue portals by extending his or her right arm, and orange portals by doing the same with his or her left arm. Finally, the player sticks his or her left hand out to the side to pick up and drop things, and crouches to, well, crouch.

As you can see from the video, it works pretty well, although Portal 2 isn’t optimized for use with Kinect and some of the game’s more difficult puzzles would be pretty tricky playing this way. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see how a first person shooter could work on Kinect with some slightly more intuitive movements, as long as players can get past not having anything in their hands.

Source: Dvice

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