Kinect and federal spending

The Freakonomics blog posted a link to Budget Climb, a way of letting people comprehend the size of the the abstract dollar amounts in the federal budget.

Instead of just visualizing the amounts, Budget Climb lets people in front of a display pantomime climbing the size of different budget items over the years. In the video, I noticed a long little box with a light on it under the screen and I checked the website. Sure enough, this is a Kinect application.

I wrote a post back in April outlining how non-game applications of Kinect are a positive externality. At one point it was tempting to update the list with more applications as they became public, but they're so numerous now it's impossible to keep up.

This is a novel educational (and political) application, and we can expect to see more like.