The Inside Story of Microsoft's 'Project Natal'

Lanxon writes "Wired has published a lengthy behind-the-scenes feature documenting the inception, development and technological struggles of Microsoft's Project Natal, now known as Kinect. The feature is the result of conversations the magazine had with a number of key developers and researchers behind the project, and unprecedented access to Microsoft Research in a number of countries, over the course of three years."

Comments

Re:Waste of R&D dollars, if you ask me

[bberens]

Some of this I think is just timing. With respect to the timeline of human existence we've made some really historic, revolutionary discoveries/innovations in the last 50 years. The revolutionary discoveries have waned and now we're continuing with evolutionary progress. This is easily seen in computers and cell phones that keep just getting smaller and faster but lack really amazing new things. Having them at all was revolutionary, now we're incrementally improving upon them. IMO the industrial revolution is largely over. The past 50 years are the exception rather than the rule. Will we have another technological renaissance? Probably, but we need to figure out how to use all the stuff we've already invented/discovered first.