Slashdot Mirror


Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out

Just last week we learned that the Kinect had been hacked wide open and already we're seeing a flood of innovative stuff coming out. Jamie found a page with a lot of pictures and screenshots, and Engadget has more.

7 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Too Cool by Aladrin · · Score: 2, Informative

    And an IR emitter. And the software to make them work together.

    The Kinect provides more than just a couple webcams.

    --
    "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
  2. Re:thx for helping us, Love M$ by alen · · Score: 2, Informative

    only if you use the same code

    once iOS 4.2 comes out it's going to have brightness control outside the settings app, similar to SBS Settings. Doubt apple will release the code since they made a lot of changes. all you have to do is take the code, change enough of it to make it look like your own and release it

  3. Re:Too Cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The hardware is quite a bit more than a glorified webcam. Check out this article for more information:
    http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/11/features/the-game-changer?page=all&p=2

  4. Re:Targeted Ads by vlm · · Score: 2, Informative

    You're crosswatching too much. Crosswatching is not some psuedo-christian thing, its the TV watching equivalent of cross dressing.

    They already target advertising extremely aggressively. We have DVRs so I only see flashes of commercials, but it seems my wifes soap operas don't advertise many video games and I don't see many feminine products advertised on the embarrassingly named syfy channel.

    There are entire genres of TV shows I don't see ads for, don't know that exist (at least from my TV viewing), such as dancing with famous people, or musical high school children.

    If you like... those kind of shows... hey, thats OK, but you can't demand they change their whole product lineup just for one guy on slashdot.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  5. Re:thx for helping us, Love M$ by Marcika · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm still waiting for ...focus follows mouse...

    A second of googling turned up this:

    "Believe it or not, Windows does support focus-follows-mouse, though there is no GUI configuration exposing it. Instead you must edit a registry key and then log out and back in for the change to become effective. You can use regedit to edit the key. On Windows NT, set the following registry key to have a value of 1: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\Active Windows Tracking On NT it has some bugs: some apps auto-raise on focus, and alt-tab doesn't move the mouse. On Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, you need to change a binary-valued registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask This is a little-endian bitmask. For focus-follows-mouse, add the flag 0x1. For example, my XP SP2 laptop originally had a value of 9E 3E 05 80, which is 0x80053E9E. To activate focus-follows-mouse I changed to 0x80053E9F, or 9F 3E 05 80 in regedit. According to http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/18/ you can also achieve raise-on-focus by adding the flag 0x40. I haven't tested that as I don't like raise-on-focus."

    As for virtual desktops, I'm using a decent open-source third-party add-on called Z-Systems Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager...

  6. Re:thx for helping us, Love M$ by dmmiller2k · · Score: 2, Informative

    Companies don't patent things because they're hard, they patent things so that they can control their use.

    Which boils down to "they patent things so that they can generate revenue from them". Follow the money.

    --

    "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin

  7. Re:Too Cool by gwjgwj · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think that the principle of operation is different. It projects a known pattern and then identifies the position of each dot as read by the IR camera. I think the pattern is similar to this one . Based on that it is able to compute the distance to every dot.