How to Turn Kinect Snapshots into 3D Statues in MineCraft

Since the release of Microsoft's Kinect, there's been no shortage of useful and fun hacks.

In the past, we've seen the Kinect modded for things like x-ray vision, World of WarCraft gameplay, air guitar and 3D video.  And now there's even a use for all of you MineCraft gamers!

Thanks to Nathan Viniconis, you can now take a snapshot of yourself with the Kinect and transform it into a MineCraft save file, which can create some visually stunning 3D statues inside your MineCraft world.

The Depth and Color information will be used to approximate the position and types of blocks to best represent the 3D point cloud in MineCraft.

The breakdown of hacking the Kinect into MineCraft worthy statues is as follows.

• Python scripts
• Getting color and depth Kinect data saved as files
• Opening up a MineCraft world save file
• Determining the orientation of save so a world render will show the image
• Saving the information to a save file
• Adding color data to each rendered block
• Modifying the other data

To see the complete and complicated process in its entirety, visit the full tutorial by Viniconis on Order of Events.

[via MetaFilter]