Bench Press

We’ve blogged before about applying gaming technology to science, but much of that has been about using games or gaming system chips. A recent Wired magazine article reveals another interesting use case: taking the capabilities of something like Microsoft’s Xbox360 Kinect system and applying it directly to science research!

Apparently, a number of groups have decided to try out the Kinect as a “poor man’s” LIDAR (a tool that can be used to see and measure where things are in three dimensions)/complicated 3D camera setups which are expensive and require sophisticated calibration/post-processing analysis.

Of course, the Kinect is not a panacea: it has much more limited range, requires researchers to build their own analytical software, and the Kinect can’t do high-speed video (yet). But, because of its much lower price, its size, and the availability of drivers because of the active Kinect hacking/DIY community (and the support that even Microsoft is providing for people using Kinect beyond gaming), a number of researchers have decided to embrace the Kinect as a scientific tool.

The article profiles two potential use cases which only begin to scratch the surface of what this technology could be capable of: mapping meltwater lakes that form on top of glaciers (see images below) and studying small body impacts in space.

But, potentially the most valuable use of Kinect? As the Wired article puts it:

The Kinect’s best asset may be that it inspires students, Tedesco said. Rather than a daunting black box with convoluted cables and arcane software, the Kinect is something that many students are already familiar with.

“This creates a different mindset in students,” he said. “They’re not so scared about using the Kinect, and they can really get involved in learning and basic research.”

“I’m actually on my way to buy two of them right now,” he added.

(Image credit – Kinect) (Image credit – Kinect glacier map)

We’ve talked before about researchers using PlayStation game consoles and gaming graphics cards to perform scientific computing, but we hadn’t heard too much about Microsoft’s XBox. Until now, that is, when University of Warwick researcher Dr. Simon Scarle demonstrated the use of the graphical horsepower on an XBox360 in high performance computing. By taking advantage of the parallel processing power of the on-board GPU, Dr. Scarle was able to use an Xbox360 to aid in his research and sidestepped the need to reserve time on a dedicated parallel processing computer or shell out thousands for a parallel network of PC’s.

Armed with his gaming console, Dr. Scarle used the Xbox’s GPU computing power to calculate and even predict cardiac arrhythmias based on his model of electric excitations of the heart. The result? A paper titled Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem.

This is a highly effective way of carrying out high end parallel computing on “domestic” hardware for cardiac simulations. Although major reworking of any previous code framework is required, the Xbox 360 is a very easy platform to develop for and this cost can easily be outweighed by the benefits in gained computational power and speed, as well as the relative ease of visualization of the system.

So much attention thus far has focused on using the PlayStation 3 in distributed computing projects like Folding@Home — maybe its time that Microsoft release some sort of software to let the legions of XBox360 owners out there show the PS3 users that their machines are good for more than just gaming?