Kinect Hack Makes Monkey Toy Dance Into Your Nightmares

I'm not a big fan of monkey toys; it all goes back to my youth and Monkey Shines with that creepy monkey beating the cymbals. This hack for the Kinect doesn't have a monkey with cymbals, but the monkey toy moves by itself and that is enough to guarantee I won't have this thing in my house. Creepy or not, this is an interesting hack.

The hacker is Subtours and the hack takes a Kinect and some other parts that hook up to a stuffed monkey. The monkey has ten servomotors inside and is connected to an Arduino microcontroller as well. The servomotors activate a metal skeleton inside the monkey. All the parts inside the monkey together work to allow the user to become the puppet master thanks to Kinect's motion tracking.

The robotic, servo activated monkey dances and mimics the users exact moves. The Kinect camera is inside the white thing you see above the monkey on the wall in the photo. You can check out the monkey hack in the video below.

[via PCWorld]