Just the other day a friend of mine sent me this video. Its a video of "Sketchpad" developed in 1964 by MIT. It is a 2d and 3d drawing application that is run off a computer that looks to be the size of an entire room. As a hand draftperson back then, they must have looked at this and thought that these MIT nerds were crazy... If they could only have seen the future.

If you thought that was cool you should check out some of the related videos to this one. Seeing this reminded me of all of the Microsoft Kinect hacks that have been happening since the hardware was released. If you aren't aware, Microsoft Kinect is a 3D camera that you can add on to your XBOX 360. The 3D camera makes YOU the controller, rather then a joystick or WiiMote. To get an idea of how this works, check out this video:

Microsoft has been making the Kinect open source so that anyone can "hack" it to control whatever they want. Check out these videos to see what folks have been coming up with:

All of those hacks have been done with an inexpensive piece of hardware and just your average home computer. Add in a dash of Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets, and an episode or two fo Star Trek and you've got yourself a hack. Its amazing what we can do today with such available technology.

Hopefully in the near future we'll be modeling with our minds and our hands, instead of a mouse and a keyboard!