Ghost hunting with Kinect

Who can resist a scary movie? Even the most jaded of us enjoy a good ghost flick, which is why we were intrigued by the latest short film in the spooky genre. But this cinematic effort purports to be fact, not fiction, and its veracity—or its plausibility—is grounded on some pretty hard-core engineering: Kinect for Windows.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUrB3yaeA3I[/embed]

By using the latest Kinect sensor and SDK, a team of paranormal investigators claim to have captured an “anomaly” in a reportedly haunted house near Miami’s international airport. Their YouTube video (above) includes various slow motion takes and different Kinect views, and you can definitely see something flying across the screen from right to left. Is it an insect? The investigators swear it’s not. But even team leader David Pierce Rodriguez won’t say definitively that it’s a paranormal phenomenon.

What he does say without equivocation is that Kinect for Windows is a great tool for exploring such unexplained things, noting that “the Microsoft Kinect enables us to capture evidence of the paranormal through the use of an RGB camera and depth sensor.” And he’s far from the only paranormal investigator using Kinect for Windows in an effort to capture videos of ghosts—just check out this Kinect capture of a purported spirit dancing in an antique store in Rocklin, California, or this supposedly ethereal coach-potato recorded by Kinect’s depth and skeletal views.

And while we’re making no claims that Kinect for Windows will help you document the source of those rattling chains in your guest room, we can state for the record that the body tracking and depth sensing capabilities of Kinect for Windows provide optimal tools for detecting and recording potential paranormal activities.

The Kinect for Windows Team

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