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Indian Engineers Modify Kinect To Help the Blind Walk With Confidence

Posted by Soulskill on from the paging-geordi-laforge dept.

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."

14 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Seems rediculous but... by hellkyng · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Seems rediculous but... by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't find that ridiculous. What's ridiculous is that some people thought it was comparable to the wiimote. Kinect won't displace gamepads, but cheap depth-field sensing is too useful to go away.

    2. Re:Seems rediculous but... by MimeticLie · · Score: 2

      Notice that all of these stories about Kinect don't actually relate to its stated purpose. Kind of ironic that Kinect seems useful for everything except gaming.

    3. Re:Seems rediculous but... by jpwilliams · · Score: 2

      Actually Microsoft has had plans beyond gaming for the Kinect for some time. They just announced/released the "Kinect for Windows" for Laptops and Desktops, and they have been testing the technology in classrooms and medical facilities, as well as releasing a Kinect SDK for the non-hacker.

    4. Re:Seems rediculous but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What has really made it so revolutionary is Microsoft's open nature about it.

      Lol, Except for the bit where they stated they were never going to release a driver, that using it with a PC voided the warranty, and that use for any other purpose was illegal, and threatened anyone who started making a driver.

      Fortunately, one of the guys they hired to develop(johnny lee) offered 3k of his own money through a front for the first person to release open drivers for it.

    5. Re:Seems rediculous but... by dbc · · Score: 2

      The technology was developed by PrimeSense. Microsoft's gaming unit brought it into Microsoft. As I understand it, Primesense was initially aiming to make it part of every television as a remote control device. No longer will you lose the remote behind the couch cushions. The robotics community jumped on the Kinect right away, since high resolution distance measurement of the robot's environment is a long standing problem. Out of the box, though, I think the Kinect in its current form has trouble in outdoor environments since the sun is such a strong IR emitter. That is a generic problem with anything that depends on IR.

  2. Congratulations! by multiben · · Score: 2

    Well done to the team who worked on this project. I love hearing about positive contributions like this.

  3. Indoor use only... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    beings that the Kinect uses unmodulated IR, sunlight will completely wash out the dim IR coming from the Kinect.

  4. When it crashes, so do they ;-) by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  5. Re:Indian? by Narmi · · Score: 2

    I don't think there would have been any complaints if the story read "a team of German engineers have...".

  6. Re:Indian? by multiben · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Engineers? by Frankie70 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Why is this post about engineers, when they are just people?

  8. ACs usually cannot afford Microsoft *any* credit by benjymouse · · Score: 3, Informative

    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*
  9. Re:Dork by Jyms · · Score: 3, Informative

    They bought it from a company called 3DV Systems. It was then called the ZCam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZCam).