Gmail Motion prank-to-reality

Slashdot reported that Google’s April 1st prank announcing a gestural interface for Gmail dubbed Gmail Motion received a same-day response from IMD’s own Mixed Reality lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies, highlighting its own, very real gestural control system “Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST)” developed for Kinect.

Slashdot sez: “In this tongue-in-cheek video, researchers at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies take playful jabs at Google as they demonstrate their software for controlling Gmail with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. The gesture controls are strikingly similar to those jokingly suggested by Google in their fictional Gmail Motion application, posted as an April Fools’ day prank. The researchers have made their software available for free on their website.”