Hacked Pool Tables Use A Kinect To Track and Disco-Fy Your Game

Over at South by Southwest, OpenPool is showing off these pool tables, which use a Kinect to track the movement of the billiard balls and a projector to overlay trippy shapes following how the balls move. Looks neat! Even better, it's open-sourced, so users can upload their own spins on the project and share them around. Might not be as important an effort as, say, saving rare rock art or talking to a doctor, but the Kinect is nothing if not versatile.

We also caught sight of this cool tracking system that points a laser down the barrel of your cue to calculate its geometry. Maybe we can turn out the lights and try out both.