A Microsoft Kinect hack lets World of Warcraft players cast spells, fight opponents and maneuver their characters using simple hand gestures and body movements.

Using Kinect and an open source framework tool called OpenNI, University of Southern California researcher Evan Suma and his team at the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies hacked together a middleware program called the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, or FAAST, which lets World of Warcraft players plug Kinect directly into their computers’ USB ports. Then the software translates real-world gestures into in-game commands, so players can level-grind with their fists.

“Our software communicates with the Kinect software and recognizes the user’s skeleton,” Suma said in a phone interview with Wired.com. “It calculates each gesture you do and generates virtual keyboard commands, allowing you to communicate through them.”

Off the shelf, Kinect uses cameras and a microphone to capture gamers’ movements and voice commands, translating the data and letting players skip the standard Xbox 360 controller. The promising peripheral has sold extremely well since its launch in early November, but some pundits have criticized the library of Kinect games, which focuses on casual titles. Third-party hacks like FAAST might open up more possibilities for deeper gaming using Kinect, whether applied to other PC games or to entirely new pieces of software.