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Hands-On With Microsoft's Touchless SDK
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister takes Microsoft's recently released Touchless SDK for a test spin, controlling his Asus Eee PC 901 with a Roma tomato. The Touchless SDK is a set of .Net components that can be used to simulate the gestural interfaces of devices like the iPhone in thin air — using an ordinary USB Webcam. Although McAllister was able to draw, scroll, and play a rudimentary game with his tomato, the SDK still has some kinks to work out. 'For starters, its marker-location algorithm is very much keyed to color,' he writes. 'That's probably an efficient way to identify contrasting shapes, but color response varies by camera and is heavily influenced by ambient light conditions.' Moreover, the detection routine soaked up 64 percent of McAllister's 1.6GHz Atom CPU, with the video from the Webcam soon developing a few seconds' lag that made controlling onscreen cursors challenging. Project developer Mike Wasserman offers a video demo of the technology."
the SDK still has some kinks to work out.
Sure sounds like it.
Is this why they have cameras built into the digital TV converter boxes?
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Sounds like a piece of crap to me.
A couple weeks ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, Barack Obama -- the messiah himself -- came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was busy and in any case I was sure the secret service wouldn't even let me shake his hand.
As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as his cock -- or at least as I imagined it!
I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a liberal democrat and had been on the Obama train since last year. Of course I'd had fantasies of meeting him, sucking his cock and balls, not to mention sucking his asshole clean, but I never imagined I would have the chance. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of Barack Obama, the chosen one.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?
I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled.
I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big half nigger cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was that Barack Obama wasn't there to see my loyalty and wash it down with his piss.
I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. It's even better than listening to an Obama speech!
Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
I often think of Barack Obama dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful democrat.
Can it recognise that someone's about to pick up a chair?
Sounds a lot like the stuff developers have been doing with the Eyetoy since PS2... I wonder if this tech will show up on the 360, and they're just getting the kinks out now with this stuff? I don't know if people would use that practically since they would have to switch from having their hands up in the air to down on the keyboard/mouse for various things... Maybe it can be used for kiosks for people who worry about germs...
Twinstiq, game news
if you consider MS-PL Open Source.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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You really don't expect efficient code from Microsoft, do you?
While it's very vogueish to make comparisons with Apple products lately, Sony's Cambridge studio are the group that spring to mind when it comes to gestural webcam-based interfaces. On a related note, their original Eyetoy tech demos were similarly "keyed to color", using large foam props, although the end product worked on skintones and therefore was heavily dependent on good lighting and contrast. They patented a "wand" with coloured LEDs back in 2005 which provided a reasonable compromise between the two (a month or two before the Wii Controller popped up, and made it all look passe).
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
he's your new fucking god.
if he doesn't deliver all the goods the minute he gets into office there are going to be riots and democrats will be pulled out onto the streets and beaten with ax handles. i can see it happening. you faggot democrats have no power over anything and your boy cant do shit about whats going on today. you're all going to look like a bunch of ineffective shits just like you do in the house and senate today. i'm laughing at you fucks now because i know what the future already holds.
The usual Microsoft junk: The first 3 major versions don't work very well.
A lot of people think that Microsoft is a software company that is abusive. That's a mistake. Microsoft is an abuse company that sells software.
You know, someone should have really told these guys about this thing called a low-pass filter. It's very easily implemented in hardware (heck, most DSPs can do it rather handily), and uses very little power. A TI dsp would have no problem handling this kind of load.
As for mediocre hardware, yes, the EEE is a little underpowered compared to a desktop. But, when you consider the fact that a 200 MHz dsp can encode NTSC video in realtime, chewing up 60% of the CPU is just poor implementation. That's ~1 GHz on a fully pipelined, superscalar processor, with a heatsink, to do what an embedded DSP can do with oh, say about 50-100 MHz of processing power, without a heatsink, using a RISC processor, running on AA batteries.
And this yet one of the reasons I believe programmers should have to learn hardware. They wouldn't write code so inefficiently if they only understood the typical hardware engineer's approach to these problems.
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Running Linux. And the voice commands actually work!
I'm not sure why I'd bother to chew up my battery with the webcam when I can just talk to the thing. If anything, it seems to me like the voice recognition would be far more promising than using the webcam.
Okay, I know how this is going to sound, and I'm really not trying to troll, so please bear with me. I suppose there's a contingent of people who like the thought of waving their hands in the air to control their computer (Wii users?!), but I just don't see this going anywhere, especially because Microsoft is involved. If you look at their history, they typically get things wrong the first few times. Whatever promise this technology holds, I expect that:
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I remember reading a year ago that some Toshiba Qosmios could recognize gestures. This is not the article I read, but the first I found.
Also, I don't think it's fair to kick Microsoft over this. It seems to be a bit of an experiment. I'd love to see this on Linux though, another step closer to the Minority Report world.
you're a bit late, it's been done already, but with a wii remote. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
Brown Chair Of Death. There! I coined it.
Intel made a very nice open source library for computer vision. It's called OpenCV [http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/] and can be used to track pixels (or hands, or heads...).
I first saw it on Pycon Brasil 2008, with EHCI python bindings [http://www.slideshare.net/dannyxyz22/ehci-interao-com-computador-atravs-de-webcam-presentation].
Microsoft library is not a big deal... I made a script to switch KDE desktops using face moviments with 45 lines of python script + ehci, including a lot of useless code and testing/debuging prints. :-)
Thiago F Pappacena
openframeworks wraps c++ like processing wraps java, also has opencv bindings.
MS appears to basically doing optical flow & color tracking. the above libs can do those, and more, and are great for programmers and nonprogrammers alike. tho if you really hate code, you may rather use max/msp/jitter or gem/pd.
Was just trying to watch the video (on my desktop, Linux). It hangs terribly and there is zero sound. I don't really see the reason for this video to eat up so much resources at that qality. Is the technology it is presenting of similar superiority? Is it designed for low spec portable devices?
Reverting mod.
This could be used to great effect with people that have handicaps that prevent the use of standard interfaces. Gestures that they CAN perform can be programed to take the place of gestures they cannot, ones that we all take for granted.
Why does M$ come up with this crap that no one needs on a desktop in an attempt to try to redefine the desktop experience? It has not worked. They should just stick to buying out and marketing good ideas made by other people. They need to learn that they've always been much more successful with the business aspect of IT.
It's not the official Microsoft release. It's a home project of one (MS) programmer. But, hey, "Hands-On With Touchless SDK made by some dude who happens to work for Microsoft" isn't much of a headline, right?
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In a financial crisis the prize goes to the last man standing
Microsoft is the first U.S. industrial corporation in ten years to earn a AAA bond rating from S&P and Moody's.
More than 70 percent of S&P ratings for U.S. nonfinancial companies are currently below investment grade and classified as "junk", or speculative-grade bonds. That's up from 32 percent in 1980. Microsoft wins top credit ratings from S&P, Moody's
You can type "killer aunt delete all" with sign language now too!
This shows that Microsoft is, in fact, still a major innovator in new intellectual properties. Despite all the ridiculous hits against Vista (don't hate it until you've tried it for more than 20 minutes), we all have to remember that most of the technologies we use today, from the Mouse to the Windows UI to the spreadsheet and database and even USB are all enhanced by Microsoft's commitment to new technologies.
Yes, I am a PC, and so are most other people.
PS - I do not work for Microsoft in any way, nor do I have any investments with them.
Microsoft isn't alone in this, but I do get the impression that they have a few research units that they fund as window dressing, that are constantly presenting exciting demos of pretty cool stuff that never make it into actual products and never will.
Like Detroit's "concept cars."
Or Xerox PARC's Alto.
Or a Fortune 500 company I worked at that collapsed with astonishing speed. Little groups were always coming up with amazing things, and higher-ups were always clucking admiringly over them, but the little groups never had the internal political connections to get them turned into actual products.
The actual decisions on what got made into products were based on what the salespeople that called on the bank CEOs had to say. And the bank CEOs never told the salespeople that they were ready to write $100 million dollar checks for smell navigation or a spreadsheet for calculating music or whatever.
(Probably one of the things that makes Apple what it is, for good or for bad, is that it's run by a guy who has pretty good taste in ideas and is willing to back good ideas just because he thinks they are good).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why noT? It's qu_ick
Once again, Microsoft takes a simple concept and finds a way to complicate it. Way to go, Redmondians!
...released Touchless SDK for a test spin, controlling his Asus Eee PC 901
Although McAllister was able to draw, scroll, and play a rudimentary game with his tomato, the SDK still has some kinks to work out. 'For starters, its marker-location algorithm is very much keyed to color,' he writes. 'That's probably an efficient way to identify contrasting shapes, but color response varies by camera and is heavily influenced by ambient light conditions.' Moreover, the detection routine soaked up 64 percent of McAllister's 1.6GHz Atom CPU, with the video from the Webcam soon developing a few seconds' lag that made controlling onscreen cursors challenging.
Perhaps a machine would be in order that didn't go to the extreme of energy-saving and low-quality manufacturing. Start from the top side and then work down.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It has been available commercially for a while. The dutch distributor of acorn (yes, that one) showcased it in, oh, '97 or so. That distributor had a clear business focus on retarded kids. Guess who's all grown up now?
Okay, I know it's a little late to post this, but these are the numbers I'm getting from my EEE 900. I'm running a 3-tap FIR filter to average all the pixels in a dummy frame. This doesn't include the time it would take to pull the frame from the CMOS/CCD sensor.
On battery alone:
On AC its a little better
Given the sensor resolution is 1280 x 1024, it appears their algorithm uses the full resolution. They could probably get much better results if they used 320 x 240. A little speed binning goes a long way.
Respond to this post if you're interested in the code.
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...and one of the first things they did as a sample was to write Pong.
Finally! Game play has come full circle.
http://communityclips.officelabs.com/Video.aspx?videoId=a89a217b-fc38-4a6c-87f8-ab59a2028391