Touchless full-body gesture-sensing devices such as the Microsoft Kinect have introduced a world of possibilities to interactive computing. However, the technical understanding and programming skills required to make use of these devices left them largely out of reach for designers, hobbyists, gamers and professionals outside of computing. To lower the floor of technical skills needed to utilize the technology in custom applications and to enable rapid prototyping of gesture-based interactions, we have developed Hotspotizer.

Hotspotizer allows users without computer programming skills to design, visualize, save and recall sets of custom full-body gestures. These gestures are mapped to system-wide keyboard commands which can be used to control any application that runs on the current versions of the Microsoft Windows platform.

Hotspotizer is centered around a novel, easy-to-use graphical interface, based on space discretization, for specifying free-form, full-body gestures (i.e. “teaching” gestures to a computer) for use with the Microsoft Kinect sensor.

The software, which runs on Windows 7 or Windows 8, is freely available to download and use.

See the project page for more information and to download the software.