The Kinect is awesome by all the ways it can used beyond the typical Xbox 360 gaming. Minority Report future, here we come! We’ve spent plenty of hours watching YouTube videos dedicated to creative hacks of the motion sensing powerhouse, awed by the minds much geekier than ours. Sure Milo was neat but come on, using your fingertips to control a robotic claw? Mega geek hack!

We heard about a new one that combines functionality and uber geek into a new way to gamble. Our peeps over at PokerListings dialed us into an interesting way to spend your paycheck and keep your butt from getting too big. Full motion poker geeks! Instead of staring at your monitor, exercising that single index finger, you can get up and really raise your bet.

The University of  California‘s Institute for Creative Technologies built FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit) which tracks skeleton movements via the Kinect and other programs like OpenNI. To do this, you’re gonna need both – okay all three. Plus you’re going to need the Kinect drivers for PC and a macro program to hotkey this bad boy! Want to dig in and show those other poker players how to do it “geek style”? Hit the break!

Using FAAST to lose your rent check requires OpenNI and the Kinect for Windows SDK both of which can be found on the UC website. Once you’ve downloaded those plus FAAST and installed them, you need to grab your trusty Kinect and plug it into your handy-dandy computer. If you usually have it running on your Xbox 360S, you’ll need to grab the power adapter to juice it up for a go-round of poker.

If all goes well, everything should install correctly. If it does, starting up FAAST will allow you to configure the trackers for your preferred gestures.  Make sure to keep the camera resolution at 640×480 – 30fps, otherwise the program won’t call in to your Kinect – which would make this whole endeavor pretty much pointless.

The actions tab will allow you to map how you want the program to interpret your frantic motions. The guys over at PokerListings have their own faves but you can create your own. The formula is simple, as you can see in the above pic, which goes as such – body part_direction\how far it has to move\action\what key or button to press. The full list of actions is detailed below:

You’ll also need this handy dandy event list to associate your swipes and chops with mouse clicks:

Using the formula with those beautifully formatted charts, you can customize it to however you feel comfortable playing in the shark infested waters of online poker. But wait, we’re not done! You need to get your macro on for the actual poker client you run. You’re on your own there, you can find plenty online to suit your whims. Set up a macro for each of the hotkeys you made in FAAST. This is so your Kinect motions will translate into “clicks” which is kinda helpful if you want to win your self some cold hard cash.

After all that you need to boot up FAAST, connect to Kinect, bring up the poker site and get ready. Haven’t found a good one? PL has your back on that, check out their Real Money Poker section for some ideas. The final step in the process is to calibrate your body with the Kinect tracker in FAAST. If you’ve done everything right, you can now literally kick butt in poker. Okay virtually but I do believe you get the point here. Wonder if some geeks can go even further and make some trash talking software with the Kinect?

If you have any questions, make sure to hit up PokerListings for an even more in-depth walkthrough and troubleshooting. If any of you fine geeks attempt this wacky hack, let us know how it works out. I’d try it out but I have a phobia against gambling. Check out the video the guys made showing it off, you’re going to like it.

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