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Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World

Posted by Soulskill on from the gesticulating-at-robots dept.

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."

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. biometrics lurk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Eyeball scanning is only a step away, then they'll know if you've paid for the game service. Not on record, oops give us a credit card first... We know you've not played this game before in this living room.

    1. Re:biometrics lurk by Vanderhoth · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      It won't need to do an eye scan. There was a story a few days ago http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/15/1347205/Exciting-Kinect-Stuff-Already-Coming-Out about things people are using the hacked kinect for. One guy is showing how it can be used for object recognition. I'm sure the tech will eventually be good enough to actually recognize a specific person with out the eye scan.

    2. Re:biometrics lurk by Vanderhoth · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      I asked a guy in my office who owns one and XBox. He said his doesn't do that, but he doesn't doubt that it could or might be doing it under users' noses.

  2. I was modded to oblivion when I asked the question by dltaylor · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1855134&cid=34133246

    And now there's an actual admission?

    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."

    Is there any way to remove the mod capabilities from the morons that modded me down?