Is the world ready for Kinect sex?

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales: insensitive to scopophobia sufferers

What's bigger than a list of leaked Gawker logins and has more sexy spies than James Bond's wildest dreams? Yep, it's Weird Tech!

In the UK, tech events' celebrity guests tend to be Stephen Fry and the funny looking one from The Gadget Show - but in Russia, they get what Reuters calls "sexy spies".

According to the news agency, "Russian spy Anna Chapman showed up at President Dmitry Medvedev's showcase science park on Tuesday, the latest in a long line of celebrities invited to add a touch of glamour to Moscow's answer to Silicon Valley".

Chapman was wearing "a knee-length black dress, with a green velvet corset," Reuters said before going for a cold shower and a lie down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was there too, staring at people and asking them for money. Er, probably.

Tom Cruise gets Kinect(ed)

Admit it: when you first saw Microsoft's Kinect, part of you thought "Wow! That's a bit like Minority Report!" You weren't the only one: Garratt Gallagher at MIT has taken things a step further and actually created an interface like the one in the film.

CRUISE CONTROL: Channel your inner Jean Michel Jarre with a Kinect piano

Is Gallagher's version also powered by three psychics in a bath? Probably not - but then Tom Cruise couldn't use his computer as a piano, so it all balances out.

Kinect Kinkiness

But invisible musical instruments aren't the only things Kinect can do: Dan Wilcox has created a system that uses its sensor to track man-boobs, overlaying the offending bits of chest with a nice virtual bra - beware, the language may be NSFW.

Manboobs

NICE PAIR: Fighting the scourge of man boobs, one pair at a time

That's got MSNBC asking, will we ever see a Kinect sex game? The answer appears to be: yes, but OH GOD MY EYES.

Even better than the rail thing

When the aliens come for us - and we all know it's just a matter of time - we'll be glad that the military-industrial complex has been spending billions on new and terrifying ways to kill things. The US Navy's latest wheeze is an electromagnetic rail gun, which can already punch an enormous hole in something from 100 miles away.

BIG GUN: Life imitates Quake: the US Navy is building frankly terrifying rail guns

As The Register points out, a US Navy Nimitz-class supercarrier "would be able to ripple off 15 irresistible Mach-7 thunderbolts every second". Yikes!

"What is Watson?"

The legendary US game show Jeopardy has a new kind of contestant: a supercomputer. IBM's Watson will take on two humans in February, and it'll have to do something humans can no longer do at quiz nights: answer questions without sneakily Googling for the answers.

Watson

YOU SAY WAT?: IBM's David Ferrucci helps calm Watson's pre-show nerves [image credit: IBM]

According to IBM's chief scientist of Watson computing, David Ferrucci, Watson could "help you understand and leverage all that information out there, so that people can focus on solving their problem and not get overwhelmed by information". Maybe other game shows will follow. Anyone fancy seeing Watson attempt Total Wipeout?

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Carrie Marshall
Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall (Twitter) has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR.