I am interested in using the kinect to manipulate 3d meshes or surfaces in a program like rhinoceros or blender.  There are plenty of motion capture projects out there, but I am more interested in taking hand gestures and mapping them to various 3d modeling commands.  The leap motion might be much more suited to this, but because I have never done anything involving hand tracking, perhaps a good first step would be using the kinect.

I think it would be interesting to track fingertips in 3d space and connect them with a curve in the modeling environment.  As the hand moved around it would sweep out a surface.  I want to computationally alter that surface according to the velocity or even acceleration of the points.  The surface could become more convoluted, spikey or maybe perforated. A sculpture made from this 3d model would therefore contain not only visual information about the path of the fingertips, but also about the motion (velocity and accel.)

kind of like this (but hopefully smoother, and computationally altered):

Of course I also just want to continue working on the truss genetic algorithm.