Mapping the World with Kinect

What can't these things do? "Stop making headlines" is apparently the answer, as an enterprising open-source Kinect hacker has taken his Kinect, mounted it to the roof of his car, and driven around with his laptop and his phone's GPS to create a map of the world. Built from a spatial point system, his software outputs a three-dimensional map of the world it views, each point tagged with GPS co-ordinates.

The man behind this modern-day wizardry is a software developer by the name of Martin Szarski, who developed the whole exercise pretty much just to see if he could. By combining work that had previously been done on working out the calibrations required to match up the RPG camera and the depth camera, he was able to work out and assign an RPG colour to each spatial point and, using a bit of voodoo, turn it into a 3D point-map representation.

From there, it was simply a matter of strapping it to the car and driving around. Martin posits that access to the gyroscopes and accelerometers in a phone would provide for less messy mapping, although quite frankly the results are already super-impressive - and the implications for fast-map-generation of game levels quite compelling. Share your deepest thoughts in the comments.