COMPANY SHOWS OFF KINECT BANKING APP

By Nancy Gohring, IDG News

People may soon pay bills and manage their banking by waving their hands in front of their TVs, if an application from a Lithuanian company at this week's CTIA conference proves successful.

The application, developed by Etronika, uses Kinect, Microsoft's motion and voice sensing technology developed for its Xbox 360 games console.

The interface has two rows of icons that spin as if on a carousel. Waving an arm to the left rotates the top row, and waving to the right rotates the bottom row. Users select an icon by bringing their hands together in front of them.

Andrius Kusas, a system architect at Etronika, demonstrated how a user might pay a bill using hand gestures. He then held up his mobile phone and an image of it appeared on the screen. By waving his hand to the left, he sent a copy of the bill to his phone.

Etronika offers a variety of software that banks use for services like online banking. The Kinect application is in development and Etronika hasn't sold it to a bank yet, Kusas said.

That may be because Microsoft doesn't yet allow developers to offer commercial products based on Kinect. In June, Microsoft released a beta version of a software development kit that let hobbyists build apps using Kinect on PCs running Windows 7. People can build apps for noncommercial use, but Microsoft has said it plans to release a commercial SDK package in the future.

Link to article:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/241715/company_shows_off_kinect_banking_app.html