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Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World
kkleiner writes "A student at MIT's Personal Robotics Group is going to put Microsoft's Kinect to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery-powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel's creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go."
In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."
http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect_node
With the calibration the accuracy of Kinect is much improved.. and ROS has algorithms that can do this automatically for anyone lucky enough to have a manipulator - speaking of which, when is Microsoft coming out with a $150 robotic arm? :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
Google BotView. Little robots roaming the world making 3d models of everything.
If it rhymes it must be true.
This. Is. Awesome. I'm really hoping that this becomes a reasonable DIY project...
Why is it that the advertising potential of anything is always mentioned?
Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen,
That could be bad for those who are getting TV ad money.
When advertisers can actually measure the number of people walking out and ignoring the ads, they often start paying less for ads :).
In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."
Seriously, this is the first thing I thought when I read aboutthe Kinect. Here is a box, wired to the internet, with a hundred little beams that can not only tell what you're doing, what the room looks like to absurd levels of detail. Talk about 1984-style, in-soviet-russia type monitoring.
Forget the advertisers, with enough of these things deployed the feds won't need those vans parked outside your house, they'll grab the data in real-time from either the ISP or Mircrosoft.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Solution: wear sunglasses when you play Kinect games!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Hand gesture to "make me a sandwich". Wait iRobot says No? Okay, gesture "sudo make me a sandwich" :-)
An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.
vs.
A Microsoft rep talks about how Kinetic can be used to foster yet more advertising on people ...
Interesting difference in the application of advanced technology.
1. The internet runs on advertising and pr0n.
2. Advertisers will pay more if they can see who's watching.
3. Terahertz cameras can see through clothing.
...
Profit!!
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
That the Kinect could be used to spy on users for marketing reasons seems awfully familiar-- Oh, that's right. I brought it up last week.
Fancy that.
Here's hoping my concerns about law enforcement co-opting it bear less fruit...
I commented on this earlier this week. The potential ramifications for losing privacy in your living room are pretty bad...
davejenkins.com |
The movie with Bruce Willis comes to mind...
So, wait, let me get this straight. Reverse-engineering the drivers for use on non-Xboxes is "hacking" and "unintended" use of a Microsoft product, but Microsoft is only too happy to sell this product to advertisers? Because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the advertisers will not be using an Xbox.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1855134&cid=34133246
And now there's an actual admission?
Is there any way to remove the mod capabilities from the morons that modded me down?
May sound like a joke but I guarantee you that the MPAA would love nothing less than being able to license HD-Ray movies on a per-viewer basis, and refuse to play if your doberman is in the room. I already stole revenue from them when I watched my brother's copies of the Spiderman trilogy on his HD TV (I guess technically I stole from Sony too, as it was a sony TV and a PS3 I was using...) without paying a cent
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Yeah, they'll use the shape of your ears instead!
Get a web developer
So the Kinect has the ability to be racist? You bastards!
OK, so what happens if I point the Kinect at the TV when the ads are on? Will it select ads appropriate for the people in the ads? I'm not sure whether the results would be hilarious or depressing.
I thought Kinect did that out of the box - I remember reading that it used facial recognition to sign you into your account. Did they drop this? And if not, what happens if you're one of identical twins?
but instead of being the eyes of a totalitarian state he is the eyes of Big Business. Does the thin sliver of difference between coercion by the state and the connivance of Big Business matter? Both seek to compromise our freedom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-Four)
Actually iris scanning is here now, and actually fast and reliable. We tested a device that integrates with access control systems not long ago and I was absolutely shocked at how amazingly well it worked. Enrollment is done by standing anywhere in a 1 meter circle centered 2 meters from the front of the device, in less than three seconds, both eyes. Any height from Shaquile O'Neil to a wheelchair-bound granny. We tried, and couldn't make it fail. The only obstruction at the moment keeping it from widespread deployment is that they're ridiculously expensive, but that's because at present they're essentially custom made one at a time. Now that the electrical and optical engineers have had their fun it's time for the manufacturing engineers to have their turn, and you'll see costs drop dramatically.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen
Way to innovate Microsoft! Take a really new, useful and powerful technology and use it to do something completely mundane and stupid like tailored advertisements.
Microsoft, you are true visionaries!
The KinectBot will count the number of people watching a movie on a TV, and then that will be used to charge the appropriate per-viewer based fees. And you can earn credits for staying in the room during any TV commercials before/after the movie. And of course, there's no credits given for only partially watching a crappy movie. But if more people enter the room during the movie, the fee will go up...
An MIT student works out an interesting way to merge Kinetic with existing technologies for the benefit of users.
Like this technology isn't going to be commercialized for Microsoft's benefit and others.
OLPC also emerged from MIT. 1.5 million units distributed. The winner in that round? XP on the Netbook. The "walled garden" of the iOS. Google and AdSense. The "open source" product whose sole commercial purpose is to sell the buyer to the advertiser.
I'd like to submit a vote for hooking this system up to a lawn mower. Automated lawn mowing is why I became an engineer, but I wasn't successful in finding a job doing it. If I could now purchase a lawn mower that would automatically mow between midnight and 3am and a rate slow enough to be nearly silent (a reel mower can do this), sign me up. In fact, this appears to be possible or even easier with the Kinect requirement of little ambient light and IR interference being a problem. I don't like current automated lawn mowers for various reasons, including the requisite subsurface wires and the noisy high RPM small blades.
Didn't Comcast do this last year when the story broke that they were putting cameras into the cable set top boxes? I guess if you add in a videogame interface it becomes more palatable to the masses?
Link
... is alive and well and watching you from Redmond ( obligatory comment, sorry I couldn't resist )
make one that works easily and conviently during the day. make it safe and make it so it doesn't need wired in the ground. fully autonomous.
Then when you are rich, have your gardener mow for you at night using a real mower.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Tentatively named KinectBot
I recommend instead, to avoid the trademark, go with 'TalBot, borrowing from the original codename Project Natal.
Or, if you want to go female with it, Natalia (or NatalAIa).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This makes you think about the possibilities even for the military. This would help out our troops so much with clearing an area or room or even diffusing a hostage situation. Let's just hope that since its Microsoft that they fix any bugs unlike the failed windows vista...just sayin
Taking advantage of PS3 to create the new generation of "japanese idol" seems to be another good idea~!~
yeah, should be some laws regarding how your image and actions are used for sure... seems like that's in direct conflict with your right to privacy. Playing a video game you would not know, as a lay-person, that your image was being transmitted out to third parties.
as for examples of what the kinect can do, i thought this was more interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QrnwoO1-8A
"Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."
Another use for my sharpie besides redacting "In God We Trust" from currency--blacking out Kinect sensors used for ad placement.
Is there any way to remove the mod capabilities from the morons that modded me down?
You will need a backwards time machine to return to a time when the LCD wasn't told how to really spell /..org
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.