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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."

7 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. 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
  3. 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.

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

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

  5. 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*
  6. 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).