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Google Engineer Sponsors New Kinect Bounties
ashidosan writes "Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. 'The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.'"
Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.
I think Microsoft already announced that they're okay with it. Just don't expect any support from them.
The other (much more ambitious) idea, is to mix it with an HTML 5 demo I already was considering. I'd need some way to turn Kinect events into mouse events, I guess. Something that a browser can handle, in any case, so I think that means mouse events. Something multitouchy would be nice, but I don't think browsers support that, do they?
Step one is complete: http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/11/hacked-kinect-taught-to-work-as-multitouch-interface/. Now they just need to create an html5 demo.
Who need's speling and grammar?
Ah cool! What I was mostly worried about is how to pass those multitouch evens to the browser, though. Apart from some built-in zoom and scroll features, I didn't think browsers had any sort of general multitouch support.
But apparently, Firefox 4 has it. And apparently Safari and Chrome should be able to do it too, but I can't find anything about it yet.
Not that I'm agreeing with the premise that Microsoft never has any innovations of their own, but in the case of Kinect, PrimeSense developed the hardware. I don't know if Microsoft further developed it, or provided requirements for PrimeSense to develop it into something to use for the XBox, but it didn't begin with Microsoft.
That's OK, they actually bought the technology like everything else cool they ever sold.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And a lot of that profit goes to the over $200 million they spent to license and develop the technology. The plans didn't appear out of thin air.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The parts have been shown to cost about $50
Utter bullshit. That's just the BOM for the 'major' chips. It doesn't include PCBs, small components like capacitors and voltage regulators, the housing, lenses, cables, connectors, tilt servo. Nor does it include the cost of assembly, transport and packaging.
I suppose you think nice restaurants are a rip-off because the price of eggs and flour is so low.