Microsoft Kinect has been overall an exciting technological advancement in gesture control, to move things forward and enable use of the technology without any dedicated specialized hardware. Microsoft Research has now came up with "SoundWave" - a project aimed to gesture enable your computer using no specialized sensors or devices but just the in-built speaker and microphone. The technology makes smart use of "Doppler effect" to detect movements and gestures near a computer, the complex algorithm used to send-receive and decode gesture controls have some exciting usage scenarios like auto wake and sleep your computer, playing gesture controlled games and day-to-day computer navigation using air-gestures as shown in the video - add to that you can use this technology in a crowded place with lots of noise and even while playing audio from your speakers .

Full demonstration video after the jump.

Impressed by all those Microsoft Kinect Hacks out there, good news is you can now enjoy the same platform on your Windows machine - announced officially by Microsoft the "Kinect For Windows" will be available starting February 1, 2012.

The Guinness World Record holder for the "fastest selling consumer electronics device ever", Kinect handheld motion-sensing controller for XBOX360 got sold 18 million pieces past year. The new natural user interface system enables advanced human tracking, gesture recognition, voice control and so the user becomes the controller.

We have seen examples of developers hacking Microsoft Kinect to creating some awesome applications. An Indian developer has now demonstrated something which can be the future how we will be controlling our televisions without a remote control just by gestures, video demonstration after the jump.

Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 was aimed to bring games and entertainment to life in extraordinary new ways with no controller required, the intelligent senors inside Kinect recognize and respond to body gestures allowing a completely different way to enjoy games. Kinect is officially supplied as an addon-accessory for Microsoft XBOX 360 but thanks to OpenNI driver-port releases for Windows and Linux enthusiast are expanding a whole new horizon of gesture control applications and hacks utilizing Kinect platform.

In some interesting progress at Technical University of Munich, Germany, researchers utilized Kinect to produce a virtual X-ray that allows users to see the skeleton under their skin. The project name Kinect Magic Mirror generates an overlay of a video image with volume visualization from a CT volume and body-movement tracking using Kinect resulting in an impressive 3D Augmented Reality output as shown in the video posted next.