Slashdot Mirror
Indian Engineers Modify Kinect To Help the Blind Walk With Confidence
New submitter albinobee writes "The Kinect for Xbox 360 isn't only about gaming; it can also be used to help compensate for impaired vision, as a team of Indian engineers is working to prove. A device called viSparsh, still in its nascent stage, is a motion sensing belt that can help alert the blind to obstacles that lie in their path."
The more I hear about Kinect the more it makes it seem like one of the more revolutionary products that Microsoft has ever come out with...
Slap a corporate logo from a medical supper on it and you too can have one for the long price of $50,000
Well done to the team who worked on this project. I love hearing about positive contributions like this.
of Microsoft execs and get them to forget about Windows Phones.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
beings that the Kinect uses unmodulated IR, sunlight will completely wash out the dim IR coming from the Kinect.
I personally think it's bullshit to even mention the nationality of the engineers in the headline and the article summary.
Microsoft has finally embraced and extended the term crash!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Because it tells you their nationality.
First line in TFA
New Delhi: Mohammed Wasim is a young helpline operator at India's National Association for the Blind [...]
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I don't think there would have been any complaints if the story read "a team of German engineers have...".
In fact, when put this way it looks good on themOH GOD DON'T SAY GOOD THINGS ABOUT ME.
I like what you did there but surely you can't be satisfied with "Engineers modify Kinect to help the blind walk with confidence"? First of all, there is a lot of redundancy over there! In the context, it's obvious that people are "engineering" something so specifying "engineers" is redundant. We could substitute it with "People" but it's also obvious that people are doing the modification, so we arrive at "Kinect modified to help the blind walk with confidence".
Now that we're done with the redundancy, we still have a lot of problems left. First of all "walk with confidence"? That's accomplished by personal charisma or perhaps some drugs. Uninformative expression. Also "the Blind"? Surely that's too specific as exact same method should be applicable to any sightless thing, such as robots. Let's try "Modified Kinect - A limited substitute for sight?".
Obivously, we're just a few steps away from determining that headline is "Visual sensors can be used to substitute visual sensors", at which point we can completely eliminate the 100% redundant headline and go with a empty string.
They bought the design so thank the acquisitions team if anybody.
From whom?
And even then, so what? Every time - I said "every" - someone comes up with a great invention that will help many others, it takes deep pockets to get it to market. Who gives a flying fuck if it's Microsoft?
Oh wait. My bad. The dorks who hate Microsoft for some nebulous reason such as "monopolizing the technology market" or some some such horseshit reason do.
Let me tell you something you dork, if MS is your worst bogeyman then I hate to break to you that they're a gnat compared to what's really out there.
Sleep tight dork.
That goes for the rest of you Slashdot dorks.
That's a pretty long distance grab for the rascist card there. Is it really not interesting to you to know where people come from? We do not all belong to one homogenous mass of humans. We come from different cultures and different countries with different priorities and backgrounds. I think it is interesting to know what research is being done in different parts of the globe - especially when it is such a positive story as this.
Well here is one.
"WTF dad, why did you come to this forsaken country, India again rejected my H1B application"
It would probably pleasure you more if they actually developed this in India.
Instead it's developed at U. Penn, and "The fabrication will be done in the US".
And the third paragraph: "developing viSparsh under technical guidance of professor Rahul Mangharam of the University of Pennsylvania". So maybe Penn is more important than Indian? It's not clear from the article where they're located, I think it would be more relevant if they had said "Engineers in India" or "Engineers in Philadelphia" rather than their nationality.
There was an ultrasound torch developed 20-30 years ago, for helping blind people navigate. It was designed to help people find objects, and give different sounds for different objects (tree, hard wall etc.). It wasn't successful, but some people did use it. They spoke to the blind people who did use it, and found that they were using it to find gaps, not to find objects. The design might have been different if it had been optimised for finding gaps.
At the 39 second mark, was that guy using a using a mac?
Do you always go ballistic when someone correctly notes that Microsoft – gasp! – made a business acquisition?
Microsoft is a company. Not your extra-special girlfriend. Unclench your shaking little fists and relax a little.
predator drone their butts!
Here is another related work http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRudBPdntDo
Why is this post about engineers, when they are just people?
Because even when you can't see, it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away. With confidence.
I'd rather walk with safety. For confidence all I need is a little battery-powered box yelling "attaboy!"
Project Natal was developed at Microsoft Research Cambridg: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microsoft-project-natal
Microsoft used an Israeli company to develop the actual product hardware. This may be the reason why someone could think that MS just "bought" the entire product. Or it could be an opportunity for ./ MS haters to create a myth that MS cannot innovate.
But this was a MSR project all along.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
A nice change from developed at Quanta in Taiwan and "the fabrication will be done in China".
;)
Unless of course it will be done in the US in dangerous sweatshops...
Indeed. While they have improved the camera, the IR seem about the same.
http://support.xbox.com/en-GB/kinect/setup-and-playspace/lighting
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/01/microsoft-bets-big-on-kinect-for-windows-but-splits-its-community.ars
Kinect is uneffective in daylight. They have to use a custom built kinect variant in order to get the infra camera to sense the projected dots in sunshine. The sun is quite a rival as source of infra light :)
It also have hard time detecting shiny surfaces. The dangerous objects and situations make a fine list for the users :)
There already is a device in common use which is very useful to "help alert the blind to obstacles that lie in their path." Better yet, it only costs about $40, has unlimited power supply, weighs under a pound, and is completely portable. Here is a photo.
Let us know when they develop emacsSparsh.
...but how long before we can see real and commercially viable sex video games using Kinect motion sensing?
Real sex games: Think Rapeplay but with more depth. GTA's car sex does not count.
Let's not kid ourselves: sex sells. Most of the Internet traffic today is porn-related.
I think this reluctance and dragging of feet came from associating video games with kids, therefore the moralists are guilt-tripping game developers into not let kids see digital pee pee parts.
In other words, 'Indian jobs being outsourced to the US'?
Except that this is not being done in an IIT in India, or in any companies in Bangalore or Pune - it's being done in UPenn. The fact that members of the team happen to be Indian is just incidental to the story, and not really a reflection on Indian technical expertise.