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Kinect Hack Builds 3D Maps of the Real World
Lanxon writes "Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360 peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View. The Kinect's multi-camera layout can be used to capture some fuzzy, but astonishingly effortless 3D maps of real world locations and objects. As we saw in Oliver Kreylos' early hack, you can take the data from Kinect's depth-sensitive camera to map out a 3D point-cloud, with real distances. Then use the colour camera's image to see which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and eventually arrive at a coloured, textured model."
That is a cool hack. I wonder if Microsoft had any idea the Kinect would become such a cool hacker piece of equipment?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Link to the actual blog post: http://blog.decoratorpattern.com/2011/01/23/real-world-mapping-with-the-kinect/
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I like to play Kinect Sports when I'm driving.
I can't imagine how this awesome will be with simultaneously-connected rotating Kinects.
All glory to Arstotzka!
The new version of Need for Speed Hot Pursuit uses the Kinect mounted on your car's dashboard. The chase scenes are way more exciting, and the cops use real bullets! Replayability, however, suffers greatly.
Umm, why a kinect? Any camera could give you basic visuals, and likewise an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path, the gps gives you position data.
I just don't see how this is new
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Not necessarily new, but cost-reduced and accompanying open-source code for effective use.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
This is trivially done with ROS and the Kinect stack. I went out and bought a kinect and plugged them into my robot platforms, provided a transform between robot base and kinect sensor, and was done. It's a great application and anyone who owns a kinect should try it out, but at this point it's trivial and hardly worthy of a /. post.
rc heli wit a real gun Nuff said ;>
an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path,
The Kinect is an "IR rangefinder", but a cheap mass-produced one. Unlike the more expensive laser scanned parallax or time-of-flight sensors, it uses a special diffraction grating to produce a "structured light field" for a 2D camera to measure localized parallax.
There are also cheaper pulsed IR time-of-flight depth sensors coming on the market for home use, these could have higher spatial resolution.
The cool thing is that these things don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The thing that I find cool about modern video gtame peripherals is that they seem more standardized than in the past (with the exception of the Sega Genesis/Atari 2600 controllers.) They either use USB or Bluetooth, and to the 360's credit you can still use its proprietary wireless pad on a PC.
I believe that software algorithms are able to be used to "throw out" "dirty" data points so that your resulting 3D pointcloud is clean enough for most practical (non-scientific) uses. Or so I've been told by those performing such operations at certain national institutions. I think they know what they are talking about.
Why is that website asking permission to create a 1MB "html5 test db"? I can understand doing some testing, but on a live website?
I love seeing hardware being hacked and used for purposes other than what it was designed for. To me, that is the essence and lifeblood of true innovation and engineering.
Sidenote: why is this article tagged "microshit"? Really?
Build a 3D model of your entire neighborhood.
Convert it for use in your FPS of choice (Onslaught/ Tower defense style gameplay a plus).
Add realistic weapon drops and "spawn" points.
Drop in a few hundred AI bots, track their movements to see which positions are most/least effective.
Congratulations, you now have a battle-plan for the zombie apocalypse.
Wouldn't it be great - tweak this with GPS data or something similar, and then find some building that you think would be great for your multiplayer game. Simply walk around the building with a laptop and a Kinect, and after a few sweeps the software models the interior which you could use to import into your map editor...
The cool thing is that these things don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Yeah, that's the great thing about them, but the downside to this sort of sensor is that it doesn't scale well in size. That is, you can't use more than one kinect at a time, as the structured light fields from one will interfere with another. I suppose you can create some timing where one field will be off while another is on, but you can only have so many kinects in an area before this is impractical.
Of course it's not a problem for gaming in a living room, but it if you want to do any sort of multi robot navigation you'll have to resort to the sensors that cost thousands of dollars.
Well, two Kinects do interfere, but not much - http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/29/two-kinects-join-forces-to-create-better-3d-video-blow-our-mind/
Now, it's true that it doesn't scale as adding additional kinects will cause more interference, but two well-positioned ones can be made to not interfere too badly...
I think that you, like many people who enjoy bashing popular things, haven't actually done any reading to learn what you're talking about.
Kinect IS a camera with a 640x480 (not simply a swiviling spot rangefinder) IR rangefinder built in. And it's well under $200. And it supports USB using a protocol so simple an outsider, with no documentation, was able to build a driver in 1 week.
So what competes with it? Where is a 640x480 IR rangefinder for under $200 with an easy to use interface (not a single spot using a pedantic and difficult to debug 1wire interface), with or without an integrated color camera?
Oh... you mean you assumed kinect was simply a $20 webcam rebranded and resold for $149 or whatever it goes for in the USA?
the structured light fields from one will interfere with another
Indeed, I think a better solution is a time-of-flight sensor such as pulsed IR phase or flash LIDAR.
We use these sensors on our robots. They aren't very high resolution (64x48) but the're accurate and provide good pictures over time. The time of flight design makes the more practical than the kinect for our applications, but they're much more expensive.
Kinects?
Like anyone can even know that
why not just steal a fucking cruise missile and have done with it? moron.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
proprieterroize (V): the introduction of proprietary or incompatible features to an otherwise standard product for the express purpose of limiting the customers' purchasing options in order to artificially drive up the product's cost.
A portmanteau of proprietary and terrorize often used to describe vendor lock in strategies.
"Although the two cables appear identical, I can't use a standard USB cable to charge my GPS; I have to use Garmin's proprieterrorized USB cable instead."
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Appropriation would mean that they took control of the standard USB protocol to bend all users of it to their ultimate will; Instead they simply produce incompatible USB cables for their own products (not all USB products) to bend consumers to their will and establish vendor lock in.
It would be silly to think that a company would have to appropriate their own products. How does one forcefully gain control over something they already control?
Still here? ;) ("wit"?...hm, that did end up rather curiously)
One that hath name thou can not otter