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Microsoft To Back Kinect-Based Startups
angry tapir writes "Microsoft has announced a program designed to help 10 developers or startups launch businesses around products for Kinect, the controller that senses motion and voice. Developers with Kinect applications for the Xbox or Windows are invited to apply to the Kinect Accelerator program, even though Microsoft does not yet allow the sale of products based on Kinect for Windows."
Forget it charlie brown.
A good control scheme allows the player to have fun playing the game. Go back to your cave.
What about utilities? Consider an image viewer program. Displaying porn, naturally. Your hands are probably not free (or covered with lube). What if it did motion detection on your cock? Slowing down (or softening up) means you're bored with the current image so it will show something else.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Where does it say they need to be games? Besides, motion controls make a lot of sense for certain things. Note that Microsoft is especially looking for innovators here, and helping get them going by offering $20,000, training and offices. Lots of startups don't have access to such, but have good ideas.
My experience programming Kinect is not very good..
It fails to detect a very large range of scenarios and poses and goes crazy with objects around the studio thinking it's persons. Put your arms together, show your side or move fast enough and it will get confused.
It's really easy to make it show broken poses and seems only designed for tracking people front-facing it directly with arms stretched outwards..
Even the unofficial opensource SDK does much better at keeping track of you than the real thing. Not to mention the enormous input lag.
So, is it me or has Kinect been hyped enormously for its rather lacking technical capabilities?
Microsoft are already aware of sex-themed software for Kinect, and have rejected licensing and support for that purpose. As others have pointed out ad-nauseum, it's very hypocritical - You can massacre a whole room full of innocent bystanders in Modern Warfare 2, but you can't pinch a virtual tittie?
It's a shame, because Microsoft and its licensees are missing out on so much potential revenue. Your idea would be well-suited to those minigames between stages where both players have to hammer both buttons as fast as they can, and the first one to inflate the balloon or destroy the car won. Except, instead of pressing the buttons, you're jacking off. Against another man, who is standing right next to you. That would be a cool arcade.
Then came Mark Andreeson. He thought, "may be if I give my product, the browser, away for free and try to make money by selling tools to create the web browser, may be I can survive". But Microsoft priced its browser below zero and killed his company. The developers were aghast. But they were fretting and fuming but could not do anything about it. Microsoft can just issue a press release saying, "We are thinking of doing XYZ" and the venture capital for startups trying to develop apps that do XYZ vanish like a curl of smoke. They were fooled many times more than once.
Now, with a plethora of systems available, from Android to iOS to linux to simple plain HTML you think developers would trust Microsoft as far as Ballmer can throw a chair? No way buddy. No way.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So MS gets to see everything you have before they hand you off to some other company. The company that has been caught red handed filing patents on other people's ideas gets to see the cream of the idea crop for kinect development then they get to just stew on it. Based on their obvious propensity for dishonesty, they are almost certainly going to be poring over everything you've shown them searching for any little thing they can use to exploit. No fucking thanks.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.