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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.
When the driver was hacked I thought it was cool, but it would probably be a long time before someone actually used it for something nice. This might attract a few people.
I think Microsoft already announced that they're okay with it. Just don't expect any support from them.
seems everyone wants a piece of that kinect thing they created.
did you forget to take your meds?
You are committed to improve user experience and implement cool toys in Linux?
Then do something about better graphics drivers (help the guys developing them, or put pressure on manufacturers to open specs). You are going to need it for Chrome OS eventually, and you will gain a lot of good karma from the geeks around the world.
I'm having trouble giving a fuck. Someone please enlighten me to why anyone would want, what's basically a camera made by Microsoft, trained on their living room 24hrs a day? We'll be able to plat tux racer with hand movements?
I suspect that MS knows that they don't have a leg to stand on against the present activity(all the copyrighted code/DRM protected stuff/patented wizbangs are in the firmware, and writing a driver that just receives the data the firmware generates is the sort of thing that even the DMCA explicitly protects). I assume that their frankly nasty bluster so far has been about two things 1. management of the fears of Joe User: Joe hears "hackers hack Kinect", Joe assumes that his Kinect is now watching his children on behalf of Romanian cybercriminals. MS doesn't want that, so they talk big about how secure and law-enforcement-cooperating they are. 2. Overton window shifting: If you want a specific, and novel, legal result, you generally have to prepare the groundwork for it by modifying the discourse. You do this by the crude; but often successful, expedient of repeating your currently-false-but-desired-to-be-true worldview in public, a lot. If "unapproved use = tampering = evil" has been repeated a few thousand times by the time that DMCA 2: Son of DMCA comes before congress, it will be much more likely to make it in.
Now, if somebody does something directly competitive with PrimeSense, on a commercial scale, you may well see the claims start flying that any working Kinect driver must be implementing 127 patented algorithms and is otherwise all kinds of illegal; but that probably isn't worth the cost of process servers for the current scruffy band of international hackers...
I bet Microsoft will be all over the courts trying to stop this thing, and you know what?!.. I bet this news will sell thousands more units, knowing we can screw around with it in our own way.. they just don't get it.
Why?
The parts have been shown to cost about $50. Add a few dollars per unit manufacturing, packaging, transport.. And you have a nice little profit. So despite the whiner chorous insisting it is selling at a loss.. It isn't.
Each one sold, is more money for Microsoft.
Each one sold puts an MS logo in front of the buyer.
Each one sold increases the chances of games being written including the kinect for the xBox. And more enthusiastic reception if and when they release a Windows SDK for it.
So..Other than some vague paranoid "because it's Microsoft" excuse.. Why the flying fuck would they stand in the way of this thing selling?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
It tells me where my joints are? I want one :)
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.
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.
So selling the bloody things might possibly be a good idea yes?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
It is indeed - but the software runs on the Kinect itsself. Embedded processor. The 360 is a games console - it needs all the processor time it can get for graphics. The Kinect itsself does most of the image processing (specifically the task of producing a depth map), reducing the load on the 360.
You could use the exact same arguments to ask "why the flying fuck didn't Microsoft release it for Windows 7 too". If it's such an amazing piece of hardware for it's price (I'm told it's a perfectly capable motion capture device, and you've just said that it's dirt cheap for them to manufacture), it's tricky to see why they'd limit themselves to simulated tennis and virtual pets.
If they're making such a killing on selling these units, as you suggest, and if they're such handy devices- why haven't they been plugging it as their own, almost unique, well branded entrant into the general hardware market?
I'm not saying your point is wrong- far from it. I just genuinely can't see the logic here.
But then, this is Ballmer's Microsoft we're talking about. Trying to spot strategy there is like trying to knit with egg noodles.