During the holidays you always have a lot of company. What do you usually do to entertain them? Well, I mostly rely on my cable subscription. During this time, I’ve noticed a lot of Kinect cameras being used on certain shows. What shows you might ask? Ghost hunting shows to be exact. I’ve seen many paranormal investigators use the peripheral to track the motion of what they claim to be unseen entities. While there’s no way to verify that the Kinect camera isn’t suffering from a glitch in the software—or that the investigator’s shadow isn’t being mistaken for a spirit—it’s still an interesting use of the peripheral which seems to have found a life outside of its primary purpose of gaming.
I did some digging and the Kinect camera has appeared extensively on shows like Paranormal Lockdown, Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters, to name a few. Many investigators on YouTube also use the device to interact with spirits, not just capture them. It’s definitely interesting how technology finds new purposes, especially ones as unexpected as this.
The concept behind it is simple. The Kinect—with its build-in circuitry and modes of vision—was designed to track motion, even subtle changes. It can see in the visible spectrum as well as infrared. Aside from that, Kinect also boasts a somewhat thermal camera-like mode to help it further distinguish between people and objects. All three work together to provide the Xbox One with all the information it needs when playing motion-controlled games. At its core, Kinect is designed to detect people and their motion. Due to its precise nature and affordable price, ghost hunters have started using it.
Ghost hunting hasn’t been limited to the Kinect 2.0 device though, I’ve seen the original Kinect sensor being used on these shows too but it was never as widespread at the latest iteration. I imagine that it’s mostly due to the fact that the new sensor has more features and is much more precise.
The output you see when you use Kinect and, in many cases, Adobe’s software, is the base skeletal tracking. According to the investigators, if another skeletal figure shows up on the screen, it means that there’s a spirit there. There are plenty of instances where it appears that the spirit figure is interacting with the investigator. A recent example of this would be Paranormal Lockdown’s latest episode where it appeared as though a spirit was sitting on the ground, then stood up and started touching the presenter. It’s impossible to know for sure what’s going on as these tests aren’t remotely scientific but it’s still entertaining.
What amuses me is how Kinect has so many purposes outside of gaming but Microsoft failed to incorporate it properly into their experiences. I would still love to see these other programs make their way to Xbox One so even though we aren’t using it to hit invisible balls around, we still have access to what others are creating for this complex piece of technology. Ghost hunting is just one of many uses.
