Kinect used in Minority Report-style security surveillance

A security surveillance firm is using Microsoft's Kinect to allow security personnel to manage their surveillance technology through hand gestures and voice commands – Minority Report style.

Avigilon – a company that specializes in high definition video surveillance technology – has incorporated the Kinect into its Avigilon Control Center (ACC) to allow users to interact with surveillance footage without the need for joysticks or a mouse and keyboard. Using gestures, users can change the layouts of the surveillance footage, manipulate the video, zoom, rewind, and isolate footage as well as display content like maps and web pages.

Avigilon's Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Martz told Polygon that the team at the firm has worked with gaming companies in the past and found that technology from the games space often offered simple, easy, and engaging experiences.

"Many of us on the engineering team have seen the movie Minority Report and we always talked about how cool it would be to bring to real life," Martz said. "When Kinect for Windows came out, we saw our opportunity. Because Kinect comes from the consumer space it was the right fit for cost and quality of the development tools compared to any other motion sensing technology on the market."

With this technology, security professionals will be able to walk up to monitors or large TVs in their security control rooms and tell the software what to look for what they are investigating an incident.

"Just like Minority Report, you can interact directly with the video footage to bring up video and search through it with your hands instead of using a joystick, mouse or keyboard.

"It cuts out steps and that will help security folks get to information faster so they can help people quickly."