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Kinect used to play World of Warcraft

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Kinect's accessibility is perfect for lucrative casual crowd, which makes the efforts of University of Southern Carolina researchers to make it work with World of Warcraft a thing to delight the wallets of industry business types everywhere.

An Institute for Creative Technologies team led by Evan Suma created a bit of open-source middleware allowing players to perform actions in World of Warcraft with simple physical gestures.

Called FAAST, or Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, the software translates gestures to keyboard commands - so the end result is much like setting up custom keyboard mappings, but with physical activity tacked on.

As seen on Wired, FAAST is currently limited to left hand for camera, right hand to select attacks, and hunching for character movement,but the software's repertoire of gestures will increase over the next few weeks.

Nevertheless, it's no replacement for your trusty peripherals. "If you’re in casual play, at a basic level you can go around and do enough spells for common tasks. You can grind for leveling, go on quests … but this isn’t going to be a substitute for your keyboard and mouse," said Suma.

Check out the video below.

Thanks, GamesRadar

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World of Warcraft

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.
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