Dr. Stephen Hicks/Oxford University

While some scientists have been busy using Kinect for the forces of eeevil (read: to turn helicopters into our future robot overlords), it seems others have been busy using the motion-sensing game controller for good (read: to help the blind see).

Oxford University researcher Dr. Stephen Hicks (our hero) is working on a pair of glasses that will help people with a very small amount of vision see again. And he was inspired — at least in part — by the Kinect game controller.

Hicks' prototype for the spectacles just went on display at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition in London.

The glasses have tiny cameras built into the frames and small LED lights built into the lenses and are attached to a small but sophisticated computer that detects what's in front of the user. The computer behaves like a small robot, seeking out things of interest and presenting them to the person wearing the glasses in a simplified way.

Hicks has said that Kinect — the camera-based motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360 — as well as the iPad have helped inspire some of his team's work.

"These days computers are small enough and powerful enough to do a lot of real time visual processing such as person recognition or depth recognition and in certain cases to be able to read words," Hicks explains. "The simple idea is that the computer will recognize objects of interest and display them in a way that is simplified and bright enough for a person who has only a small amount of sight."

Hicks says his aim is to make the glasses as discreet as possible and also as cheap as possible so the average person will be able to afford them. The lightweight glasses will look essentially like normal glasses (see picture above) and the small computer they're attached to will use basically the same components that are used in smartphones, he says.

You can see Dr. Hicks discuss the project in more detail here:

Now, here's hoping these glasses also will be able to detect an incoming Kinect-controlled quadrocopter attack. For the sake of all humanity.

Thanks to Kotaku for the heads up.

For more gaming news, check out:

• Kinect quadrocopter flight, perfected by Swiss researchers
• Kinect-controlled helicopter scores win for robot overlords
• The Force is strong with "Star Wars: Kinect"
• Martial artist shows off real life motion control gaming
• Dance Central 2' delivers more dancers, music, laughs

Winda Benedetti writes about gamesfor msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things right here on Twitter.

What do you get when you cross a WorldWide Telescope with a Kinect motion-sensing game controller? You get the “universe at your fingertips,” according to Microsoft Research’s Curtis Wong, who demonstrated the gesture-controlled cosmos today at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas.

Actually, having the universe at your fingertips is how Wong has thought of the freely available WorldWide Telescope project since it was first unveiled in 2008. The software, which is freely available through a Web-based interface and as a standalone program, displays the night sky and lets users zoom in on cosmic imagery from a wide variety of sources. You can even go on 3-D fly-throughs of distant galaxies, or create your own tours of celestial hot spots.

But back then, Wong was talking in terms of fingertips tapping on a keyboard or guiding a computer mouse. Now, thanks to the Microsoft's Kinect controller, he can control the cosmos on a trio of high-definition video projectors, just by waving his hands in the air. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

"If I just move my fingers out about a half-inch, the earth suddenly begins zooming in, more and more. ... Then I bring my fingers together, and the earth retreats," Wong told me.

The effect is similar to the hand-waving tricks that Tom Cruise's character used to manipulate virtual displays in the movie "Minority Report" — only better, at least in Wong's estimation. "First of all, Tom Cruise had to wear these funny gloves with lights on them," Wong said. "We don't have to do that. ... We have a lot more control than he did. He had to move things on a 2-D surface and rotate them."

Subtle gestures can be coupled with voice commands to navigate through a 3-D computer model of the universe. You can set a planet spinning or change the perspective on our Local Group of galaxies just by moving your fingers, hands or arms. "The motions that we're doing with the universe are fairly subtle," Wong said.

The sky's not the limit
The system capitalizes on Kinect's multiple-sensor, hands-free gaming system, which processes depth data as well as audio and 2-D video as a way of letting users interact with 3-D virtual worlds through gestures, jumps and other body movements. The system has already been hacked to create virtual-reality superheroes, sign-language translators, seeing-eye guides for the blind and even touch-sensitive robo-surgeons.

In recognition of Kinect's hackability, Microsoft is planning to release a non-commercial software development kit for Kinect sometime this spring. Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, told me that the kit is "on track" to ship within weeks. Wong declined to lay out a timetable for making the Kinect connection available to WorldWide Telescope users, but it would make sense if it rolled out at about the same time as the software development kit.

The most obvious setting for a Kinect-enabled planetarium program would be in a classroom — or, come to think of it, in an actual planetarium, where a teacher or guide could control a sky show from center stage rather than from behind a computer monitor. Home users could conceivably get a kick out of flying through the virtual solar system via a Kinect controller and a big-screen TV. And there might be an eventual payoff for PC users as well. Gupta told me that Kinect's developers were thinking about "not just the 10-foot experience, but the 2-foot experience."

Of course, the new possibilities would apply to PC gamers as well: In addition to the WorldWide Telescope demo, today's MIX11 session featured a Kinect-powered "Wall Panic" PC game, in which players contort their bodies to match a series of Tetris-style shapes that flash on a large screen.

Looking farther down the software development road, Gupta gushed about potential applications ranging from yoga instruction to remote-controlled robotics. "I think the possibilities are endless," he told me. "We are looking to the community to see how they put this to use."

More about sky software:

• Sharing the Google Sky
• Science thrives in virtual worlds
• Planet hunters sift through data
• Biggest picture of the sky unveiled

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."