Kinect SwimBrowser: Surf The Internet Doing The Breast Stroke

We all know what great exercise swimming is. When I first read about this, I thought, “Great! Now we can swim, get exercise and surf the web all at the same time.” That’s true if you can hack your Kinect the way David Stolarsky did.

For the 2011 PrimeSense/OpenNI Developer Challenge, he created SwimBrowser, a browser that requires the user to use hand motions similar to those you would use when swimming underwater. Like we’ve said many times before on Bit Rebels, it seems the Kinect can be hacked to do absolutely anything.

Before you get too excited over this, just know the capabilities are still limited for this browser at the moment. For example, you cannot enter any text. However, you can maneuver tabs, open links, zoom, scroll, move back or forward, and perform a few other basic commands. Since many people are interested in Kinect and what it can do, I expect to see more and more of these fun, creative hacks this year. Dvice is even implying that someday there may even be a Kinect app store. How cool would that be? This particular browser probably won’t ever be commercialized, but it is sure fun to watch the video below, especially since David is wearing swim goggles. Nice!