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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.
The amusing and quite cleverly done telescreen kinect as an advertising tool jokes I read here on slashdot were quite fun to see!
But.....I was very bemused to see this today, reported elsewhere:
"Microsoft's Dennis Durkin voiced an interesting idea at an investment summit last week -- the idea that the company's Kinect camera might pass data to advertisers about the way you look, play and speak. "We can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are," he told investors, suggesting that the Kinect offered business opportunities that weren't possible "in a controller-based world."
And over time that will help us be more targeted about what content choices we present, what advertising we present, how we get better feedback. And data about how many people are in a room when an advertisement is shown, how many people are in a room when a game is being played, how are those people engaged with the game? How are they engaged with a sporting event? Are they standing up? Are they excited? Are they wearing Seahawks jerseys?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught-in-privacy-snafu-says-kinect-might-tailor/
yay?
what's going to happen is M$ is going to take the code and use it to add new features to Kinect in future releases
No they won't. Microsoft is notoriously unable to reuse free (as in libre) software that can't be repackaged into a binary that they can sell for $$$ without releasing the source code for. It's just impossible for them because of their very nature as a closed-source software vendor. Any GPL code out there will not be touched by Microsoft with a 10 foot pole.
Also, if Microsoft wants to create high-tech apps for the Kinect, they have all the available R&D resources to do it on their own. There are a lot of very very smart people working for Microsoft, and if a bunch of unpaid hackers can turn the Kinect into something useful in a matter of hours, so can the Microsoft PhDs and code monkeys.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Microsoft's Dennis Durkin voiced an interesting idea at an investment summit last week -- the idea that the company's Kinect camera might pass data to advertisers about the way you look, play and speak. "We can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are," he told investors,
Microsoft adds support for racial profiling!
They are a business. Their goal is to make money, not release cool things for hackers. What makes you think they don't have ideas for the kinect technology?
did you forget to take your meds?
Or, you know, just write it yourself. You think a brightness control is so hard to write that you absolutely have to steal it?
Depends on the meaning of 'hack'. This does apply to the general meaning. I actually think this is better than any firmware changes. Legally, all people have done is reverse-engineered a software driver. MS may threaten all they want with all sorts of nonsense like the DMCA, but these hackers are covered legally. Any modifications might have gotten into some more grey areas.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
I think the magic of the hardware is in the infra-red grid scattering as seen in the night-shot video in the link and (I believe, but correct me if I'm wrong) hardware level processing of that returned data from the camera... I'm sure similar setups could be engineered, but the problem is environmental control... In order to make something distributable, you'd have to find a supplier of the same light scattering system as the software author, the same webcam(s) and the placement of everything would need to be precise... The kinect is an all in one solution to that, available nearly anywhere, cost effective, and very predictable... My girlfriend is going in to Occupational Therapy and recently did a study on assistive technologies, the constant theme for all those devices was insane price points. If you follow the link in the article and watch the video of yankeyan and his object recognition technology mash up using kinect as the hardware interface, it opens a world of possibilities for open-source and very affordable assistive technologies using the kinect. Just like the NY Times article about the iPad helping those with disabilities, I think the kinect could be another low cost assistive technology platform in it's infancy.
Exactly. I'm starting to dislike this narrative that has developed here, namely that MS doesn't know what it has and that they're going out of their way to stop people from hacking it.
1. I'm sure the researchers at MS know exactly what they have and that a lot of what you're seeing now has been in their labs for ages. Its just that MS isn't in the 3D video space and aren't trying to sell 3D video software for movie production or whatever.
2. From what I've read from the guy who built the first drivers, there isn't any crypto or other tricks to stop PCs from communicating with the Kinect. Its just a plain jane USB device.
3. At the end of the day the interesting parts of the Kinect are its software. If you wanted a stereo camera or something that could do 3D depth, there are items like this in the 3D space that do a hell of a lot more than VGA resolution.
4. MS is monetizing this technology again in Win8. Gestures are built into the OS, etc. Its not like Kinect doesn't have a future on the PC platform as a commercial device.
Oh well, back to your regularly scheduled "ZOMG MS IS EVIL!!" 2 minutes hate.
Um, how about the fact that Microsoft came out with the Kinect in the first place? Isn't that pretty innovative? We wouldn't have a headline that reads "Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out" if not for a previous headline that read "Microsoft Releases Exciting New Input Device That They Spent R&D Money On For The Last Couple Years".
Sorry, but just because MS didn't fully develop and support everything someone in a dorm room can think of at the launch of their brand new hardware product doesn't mean they lack vision or innovation or whatever. Anything they release has to be supported in SDKs, APIs, be tested, etc., and that costs money and time. It's great that people are hacking it and coming up with new things to do with it, and I don't know why they tried to lock it down, but it's not locked down anymore, so who gives a crap?
Then how come they have never been able to write a better OS than, say, Linux?
Look, I use Linux and I like it as much as the next guy, and I hate to break it to you, but Windows hasn't sucked since XP came out. It's actually a very decent and stable platform nowadays, and has been for a very long time.
The other thing is, most people think it's just natural that they can run Windows 7 on an 64-bit machine and run any old software made for XP-x86 or Vista, perhaps even Win 95 (I haven't tried) without problem. The level of backward-compatibility almost every release of Windows since 3.11 has managed to achieve is nothing short of amazing. Just ask a Mac guy who had to ditch his software collection every time Apple released a new MacOS... People don't give Microsoft enough credit for *that* marvel of engineering, because believe it or not, it works so well that people take it for granted. Me, it never ceases to amaze me...
This said, I prefer to run Linux for other reasons (chiefly that I can tinker, tweak it better than Windows and code for it without paying through the nose), but if I have work to do and Windows is the platform of choice, I use it because it works. I suggest you drop the Linux fanboi attitude if you want to be taken seriously when you talk about Microsoft.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
For many who loath the idea of targeted ads I would assume many, if not most of those people are single. As a married old fart I can attest that A little intelligent ad targeting is nice. I for one get tired of feminine product advertisements because the wife uses my computer occasionally for shopping. Please, feel free to use the Kinect to determine if I am in fact: Male, Fat or Skinny, cheerful or pissed off. Because:
A: If I am male, I don't need tampon ads
B: If I am fat, don't advertise Big Macs, advertise weight loss because last I checked, fatties know where BK and McDs are. And no it's not your genetics, it's because you are irresponsible with your health. A predisposition just means you have to work harder. Thermodynamics proves this; your lack of responsibility, low self esteem, and discipline does not change the laws of physics.
C: If I am in a good mood try selling me a Beach Boy's collection. If I am pissed off Rammstien might be a better choice.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
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...
How long it will be till TVs come with Kinects built in, and can't be turned off. It would be an advertiser's wetdream, and then the DHS could use it to monitor those who might be a "threat to national Security" (everyone).
_ _
That is why linux is not going to get into mainstream desktop as every thing you want to change you have to ..
edit some mysterious files...oh wait
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.