Kinect, smack it down, or pump it up!? (Microsoft Prices Kinect)

[Onslaught]

Saw Kinect today, was surprised at how small it was in person. Very nice.

That's cool, where did you see it?

MLS All Star Game vs Manchester United. There was a tent for it outside the stadium, along with a bunch of other commercial stuff.

I also didn't have a decent camera on me. I tried taking a video with my phone, but all you can do is see the people running, it was hard to actually make out the game (Track and Field).

from what I heard..  MLS All Stars got spanked 5-2. Missed the game cuz I was selling 1 of missy's cars

Yeah, wasn't even close. Manchester scored in the first 20 seconds. I was right behind the goal box though, so I got a great look at 5 goals. 

[cuco33]

Saw Kinect today, was surprised at how small it was in person. Very nice.

That's cool, where did you see it?

MLS All Star Game vs Manchester United. There was a tent for it outside the stadium, along with a bunch of other commercial stuff.

I also didn't have a decent camera on me. I tried taking a video with my phone, but all you can do is see the people running, it was hard to actually make out the game (Track and Field).

from what I heard..  MLS All Stars got spanked 5-2. Missed the game cuz I was selling 1 of missy's cars

Yeah, wasn't even close. Manchester scored in the first 20 seconds. I was right behind the goal box though, so I got a great look at 5 goals. 

Nice!!
I thought the game would be closer myself, to be honest

[Master X]

Not a bad read
http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=646109

[VOLTAN]

Not a bad read
http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=646109

Good read.  Thx Master X

[Master X]

Kinect failing to impress
http://www.gamedot.co.uk/2010/08/03/kinect-failing-to-impress/?

If true, thats horrible.

[Isntmenttolast]

hmmmm, kinda looks how the wii fit jogging does,  you go but it just doesnt seem to pick t up imediately, *sigh*

[hdinred]

Rumor: Microsoft Sending Out "Kinect Beta" Invites
http://www.ironstarmovement.com/profiles/blogs/rumor-microsoft-sending-out

Darkfalz, hook Mid and I up with this!!!!

[miDnIghtEr20C]

Rumor: Microsoft Sending Out "Kinect Beta" Invites
http://www.ironstarmovement.com/profiles/blogs/rumor-microsoft-sending-out

Darkfalz, hook Mid and I up with this!!!!

PLEASE DARK!!   PLEASE!   

[Darkfalz]

http://electronictheatre.co.uk/index.php/xbox360/xbxo360-news/5451-michael-jackson-the-experience-on-xbox-360-kinect-to-support-four-players

Michael Jackson: The Experience on Xbox 360 Kinect to Support Four Players.

[miDnIghtEr20C]

Deep Inside Xbox 360 Kinect and Why It's the Future of Microsoft

Kinect is more than an Xbox 360 peripheral, it's the future of Microsoft, or at least a very possible one. It's the beginning of Microsoft's plans for natural user interfaces, the step beyond the thing you're staring at right now.
***

Kinect is as much a product of serendipity as anything else. When Microsoft hired Dr. Ilan Spillinger, VP of hardware and technology for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, it was to be "deeply engaged on the next-generation Xbox." Microsoft was looking to go beyond the Wii for its next big project, and about two and a half years ago, it started looking at natural user interfaces. At the same time, it had started looking at 3D cameras and input systems. Virtually in parallel, all of the necessary technology pieces to make Kinect fell into place—in particular, PrimeSense's 3D sensor.

What Microsoft considers revolutionary about Kinect—and they do consider it revolutionary—isn't that it tracks your body with full depth mapping, or responds to voice commands, or that it has a standard video camera: It's that it brings all of three of those things together for the first time. It's natural user interface in its infancy.



Raghu Murthi, the general manager for Natural User Interface Hardware, is holding a Kinect, stripped naked, as a dozen people gawk at its innards. The exposed metal seems cold. He's telling us about the optical system—how it sees with the three holes in its head that seem like eyes. Without the plastic housing they look like they're bulging out. We're at the beginning of day-long tour of Kinect, gathered in the Great Room, the living room you wish had, but tucked behind a sliding wall inside one of the many food courts on Microsoft's sprawling campus. 3D sensing has been around for 15 years, Raghu explains. What Microsoft has done, he says, is taken 3D depth-mapping technology that typically costs $10,000 to $150,000, and made it at volume, for cheap.

The way the optical system works, on a hardware level, is fairly basic. A class 1 laser is projected into the room. The sensor is able to detects what's going on based on what's reflected back at it. Together, the projector and sensor create a depth map. The regular old video camera is held at a specific distance away from the 3D part of the optical system in a precise alignment, so that Kinect can blend together the depth map and RGB picture for dynamic, on-the-fly greenscreening.

***



"Xbox, pause." The Alice in Wonderland keeps playing. "Xbox. PAUSE." Johnny Depp's freaky visage continues flitting around onscreen. The Xbox is refusing voice commands, pleas really, to pause the clip, as they're lost in the enormity of the room we're in. Pete Thompson, Xbox Live's General Manager, though visibly agitated, is inadvertently revealing that the most complex hardware component of Kinect might in fact be its audio setup.

The Kinect's size and shape is dictated almost entirely by the 4 microphones located along the bottom. It has to be precisely that large to accommodate the mics and the exact positions they need to be in. The mics, and their placement, is the result of research in 200 homes in the US, Japan and Europe. When you buy a Kinect, one of the first things you'll do is calibrate the audio to fit the room it's in. It's creating an audio profile of the room, mapping out the room's reflectivity. And if you majorly re-arrange your furniture, you'll have to do it again.

Basic voice recognition seems like an easy feat—phones do it everyday. But for Kinect, the situation is different. It's attempting to recognize voices from far away with an open mic without the luxury of push-to-talk telling it when to listen for voice cues. The trick used by Kinect is beam forming, so it can focus on specific points in the room to listen. At the same time, the audio processor is using the echo profile of the room to perform multichannel echo cancellation, so the noise coming out of the TV doesn't mess with your voice commands. That said, there's no way to lock out errant voice commands from your douchier friends: it'll listen to any human being in the room. Even if they have a thick Southern accent, like Hee-haw dipped in red eye gravy, there's a good chance Kinect will understand them: The acoustical model for every country includes regional accents, so whether you're from Boston or Alabama, you'll sound intelligible to Kinect, even if you don't to the rest of the world.
***

A row of Kinects line the wall, 16 robot heads nodding silently, endlessly. The motion is robotically smooth, completely un-biological, but alive and almost sentient. We're inside a Microsoft lab where Kinect is undergoing endurance testing. Xboxes litter the room, their cables hanging out like entrails.

More Kinects are locked in a blue box, a sign warning passersby in all caps, DO NOT OPEN CRITICAL TEST IN PROGRESS. It's a heat test. Kinect has a tiny built-in fan that kicks in on demand in hot environments, when the heat produced by the three sensors and the atmosphere around it mix to create conditions warmer than Microsoft would like. Joel asks Dr. Ilan Spillinger, VP of hardware and technology for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, if the fan isn't a just bit of over-engineering, a super-insurance policy against heat after the RRoD plague. He replies, "It would good to take it out in the future, and we'll look into it when we start to integrate the silicon, but right now, even if it's a small distribution..." in hot environments, they have to have it in there.

The red ring has been seared into the institutional memory of Xbox, undoubtedly. The way Ilan bristles ever so slightly as he tells Joel and I that Trinity, the fresh Xbox, is "a new device, there's nothing from the past," make that clear.



It's the vents that make the design tricky, Carl Ledbetter, the principal industrial design manager for Microsoft's Entertainment Experience Group, explains as he stands next to a group of rejected Kinect mockups. "When you start putting holes in things, they have to be purposeful."

I'm more focused on the two Kinect prototypes we aren't allowed to photograph, one that looks like the head of EVA from Wall-E, a palm-sized bean shape with two antennae shooting out of the side. It was probably rejected for being too personable. The second looks a lot like the current Kinect, but more Apple-like, a glossy black center wrapped in a kind of brushed aluminum.

The final design is chosen because of the mics, as explained earlier, but the shape, the angles are set that way because they're supposed to angle from the player to the experience. It's glossy because Microsoft thinks glossy means premium. (Hey guys, guess what? The cheaper matte 360 looks better than the shiny one.)



Image courtesy Microsoft

"Hardware is magic, software is two times magic."

If any phrase stuck in my head that day, it was Ilan's utterance about the other half of Kinect, the software. Alone, all of the hardware in Kinect, all the things it's capable of, wouldn't amount to much. It's the software that manipulates the raw data and makes Kinect work.

What you look like to Kinect is a vague anthropomorphic shape composed of thousands of undulating, rippling pixels, almost like an '80s rotoscope effect. The camera pans to the side of the depth map, so we can see a profile shot of what Kinect sees. It's like something out of Lawnmower Man. Using a built-in database of 20 million images with 200 distinct poses, Kinect converts that raw data, generating a skeleton and reasonable guesses about where all of your body parts are, even if it's not entirely sure based on visual cues alone—shoulders and long hair are tricky, for instance. That skeleton is what it makes available to the game.

"Theoretically you can have as many people as you want," Ben Kilgore, Xbox's general manager, says as Kinect maps the lot of us onscreen, shading us in different primary colors depending on how far back we're standing. When I line up with another dude, we turn the same color. The "design focus" was for two people though, he adds.

Kinect can identify you via facial recognition using the RGB camera, but it has a second, quick and dirty method, like for turn-based games, using the shape of your skeleton. When I jump up to try it out, it asks me to draw a few circles in the air—a few seconds later it's calculated who I am, well enough to distinguish from the other guys in the room, anyway.
***

Deep Inside Xbox 360 Kinect and Why It's the Future of Microsoft

It would be funny to at least a handful of people that Raghu and Ilan are explaining to me the future of Microsoft and natural user interfaces while we're seated at a table that is in fact a Surface, Microsoft's stillborn foray into multitouch interfaces. I like them too much to bring it up. They're the kind of people you've always hope worked at Microsoft: intelligent, strikingly earnest and genuinely interesting. I just hope there are more people like them in Redmond.

Earlier in the day, Ilan insisted to Joel and I that Microsoft is committed to Kinect in a serious way, that it won't succumb to our big fear, being abandoned like Kin or left to die like Zune, even if the market—you know, people—is slow to react at first. The three pillars of Xbox are, as Raghu sees it: content, Xbox Live and natural UI—Kinect. That's a bold statement as any about Microsoft's commitment to Kinect. (Consider, on the other hand, Steve Jobs' remark that Apple TV is a mere "hobby.")

Even at the level of Microsoft, it's hard to see Kinect as anything but hopeful. It's project that seems to go against the tide of stories about in-fighting between Microsoft divisions, an example of what happens when they actually work together. For instance, its highly developed voice recognition leveraged the work of Microsoft's speech scientists, and what they learn from Kinect will be fed back into those speech projects. God knows, Kinect isn't the only Microsoft project that could use a little love from elsewhere in the monolith.

Kinect, Raghu tells me as we're waiting for a bus to take us to Microsoft's own anechoic chamber, is Microsoft's natural user interface platform, the way that Zune is its entertainment platform. In other words, "as it spreads across other platforms" it'll get better and evolve. The question, the one that engenders possibilities, is which "platforms" it'll spread across next. Windows with a natural user interface? A Microsoft Word you can truly control with your voice? The idea of computers invisibly embedded throughout your house makes a lot more sense when they're effortless to control.

It's not for lack of dreaming. The words "Star Trek" and "holodeck" slip out of Raghu's mouth effortlessly (which you can hear in the longish interview above). "We think we will be able to replicate holodeck type environments as we go forward. That's far away from now, but that's our dream."

The down-to-earth questions like, "What happens if Kinect completely bombs in the marketplace?" "What if the killer apps don't arrive?" "What if people just don't like it?" 'What about the lag?" "What if it doesn't work as well as it's supposed to?" seem almost prudish to consider, at least as long Kinect is still a mostly just a promise, months before it hits shelves. We'd almost rather dream while we can.

   
 

http://kotaku.com/5605206/deep-inside-xbox-360-kinect-the-interface-of-microsofts-dreams

[Darkfalz]

Thanks for posting this, Midnighter. It's filled with things I've wanted to say for quite some time, but was bound not to.

"They're the kind of people you've always hope worked at Microsoft: intelligent, strikingly earnest and genuinely interesting. I just hope there are more people like them in Redmond."

That's who's working on Kinect, and making games for it. Truly.

If we all believed this was a gimmick, or it wouldn't work, or there was even the slightest chance that it wouldn't be something that would genuinely change how people interact with technology - it wouldn't be what it is, and we wouldn't be placing such a large bet on it.

What's exciting to me is the infancy of Kinect, compared to the ceiling of maturity the other guys are hitting. MOVE has pretty much perfected the motion controller that Nintendo first popularized. Sure the MOVE has better accuracy, likely less latency than the Wii (though I don't believe that's confirmed yet), etc. - but at the end of the day, it's a motion controller. How much further can they go with that concept? Where can it really grow? Maybe a little less latency? Maybe more buttons? Maybe adding more motion controllers that you tape to your body? Adding mics to the controllers? Speakers to them? I'm just not sure what can be done to them to further mature the concept.

I believe the motion CONTROLLER is reaching it's maturity as a device, and as a gaming peripheral... and it was never something that interested me to begin with.

Kinect is so much more, and it's so different. We *JUST* finished the v1.0 API's for Kinect 1.0 launch features. As is - it's so much more interesting than what Nintendo and Sony have - but when you think about where it can go in 5, ten years vs. where motion controllers can go in 5 - 10 years, you start realizing what MS is doing... and I think that this article does a great job of emphasizing that.

It's amazing what's possible once a room and all of its contents (within the field of view) can be fully represented in 3D at 30fps. Tech for recognizing almost anything in that FOV is possible.

Kinect has no where to go but up, up, up. There's so much tech to refine. There's so much software to write to better enable the hardware we have today. The possibilities are unbelievable... and I read these poor impressions, or these bloggers, or forum posters complaining, or expressing dissatisfaction and disapproval - and I can't help but just shake my head. The don't get it.

The beauty is - they don't have to. It's coming, and it will change the way people interface with machines... and for the people that don't want it, or don't think it's for them - they can pass, and they will still be well taken care of as far as content and gaming goodness goes... but those with perhaps a bit more vision, and maybe a bit less judgment will get in on the ground level for something that will start a technological revolution... and you can hold me to that. :-)

[miDnIghtEr20C]

Is This How Microsoft Will Fix Kinect's Couch Problem?



Microsoft's forthcoming Kinect camera controller for the Xbox 360 plays better with standing humans than it does with couch potatoes. Microsoft says it's still "calibrating" Kinect for seated players and may accomplish that with a little help from Amazon.com.

The Xbox 360 maker may have turned to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to make Kinect's depth-sensing camera work better when confronted with furniture, pets and people of varying shapes and sizes.

For those unfamiliar with Amazon Mechanical Turk, it's an online service that distributes thousands of small tasks to a "diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce." Those tasks include tagging objects in a photo or video, transcribing audio recordings or writing small articles. It's grunt work and typically pays pennies for small, repetitive tasks.

Kotaku reader Charonchan pointed us to a series of Mechanical Turk jobs—HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks—that appear to be Kinect related. Users are tasked with looking at an images, seeing if there is an identifiable human head in the shot, then tagging the head, shoulders, elbows and hands with a simple skeletal frame.

Many of the images have users seated on coaches or near tables, chairs and Guitar Hero drum controllers. Those images are animated—helpful for picking out details in these low quality, monochromatic shots—and they look like this.

The images are full of variety, filled with sofas, lamps, ottomans, coffee tables, big people, little people, dogs and all kinds of distractions that might confuse Kinect's infrared projector and depth sensor. They're available on Amazon Mechanical Turk for the studying and tagging until next week.

While the HIT listing doesn't specifically mention that this is related to Kinect or Xbox 360, the job requestor links back to the "Upper Body Image Tagger" on Microsoft's Windows.Net site.

Kotaku reached out to Microsoft earlier today to get clarification and comment on whether Kinect is being tweaked with the help of Amazon Mechanical Turk users, but the company has not yet responded.

http://kotaku.com/5605936/is-this-how-microsoft-will-fix-kinects-couch-problem

[DustoMan]

I loved reading that Kotaku post that Dark responded too.  I agree with everything he said.  I think when people comment on Kinect like this article where the guy at Sony that made the EyeToy and Move said "...I think without a controller you run into limits of what you can enable" they are only taking into consideration the camera recognition and not the other features that are packed into the Kinect hardware. I've heard from a couple different places that the laser depth sensor is the game changer in Kinect.  Not having to rely solely on the cameras to figure out depth adds the accuracy that's needed to make these kind of games work well.

http://kotaku.com/5605175/eyetoy-creator-says-controller+free-is-limited

Dark, I think what you said that resonates most is that this is only the beginning, 1.0 software.  Just look at how far along games have come over the last 5 years with the 360.  Now take that development arc and apply it to Kinect and I think it will be mind-blowing.  Having the magic done in software instead of hardware was probably MS's best decision even though pundits thought that the theoretical lag it would introduce would make the experience unplayable.  If MS limited themselves to a specific chip, there would eventually be an end to continued development before things would have to be swapped out for a Kinect 2 in order for the experience to evolve.

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to try both Kinect and Move and want to see where each one leads.  But I think that Microsoft is defiantly doing something revolutionary instead of evolutionary.

[hdinred]

Well said, Dark and Dusto..

[miDnIghtEr20C]

Kinect Will Recognise Sign Language



Patent reveals Microsoft's device will be able to understand American Sign Language, lip read and even track toe movement.

Kinect will be able to recognize ASL (American Sign Language), a recently published patent confirms. As reported by Slash Gear, this will allow anyone proficient in the sign language dialect to input letters words and phrases. If ASL isn't known, the system will also be able to lip-read.

"Where the user is unable to speak, he may be prevented from joining in the voice chat." Explains the patent. "Even though he would be able to type input, this may be a laborious and slow process to someone fluent in ASL. Under the present system, he could make ASL gestures to convey his thoughts, which would then be transmitted to the other users for auditory display. The user's input could be converted to voice locally, or by each remote computer.

"In this situation, for example, when the user kills another user's character, that victorious, though speechless, user would be able to tell the other user that he had been 'PWNED'. In another embodiment, a user may be able to speak or make the facial motions corresponding to speaking words. The system may then parse those facial motions to determine the user's intended words and process them according to the context under which they were inputted to the system."

As well as aligning with Apple's promotion of iPhone 4's FaceTime as being ideal for deaf users, Kinect's sign language recognition could lead to brand new game experiences and is potentially indicative of an industry becoming more aware of disabled users.

The patent also goes into detail on the 'skeletal mapping' system Microsoft uses to map players' bodies and movements, stating that the device can even recognise players' toes.

"[Within the skeletal mapping system] a variety of joints and bones are identified: each hand, each forearm, each elbow, each bicep, each shoulder, each hip, each thigh, each knee, each foreleg, each foot, the head, the torso, the top and bottom of the spine, and the waist. Where more points are tracked, additional features may be identified, such as the bones and joints of the fingers or toes, or individual features of the face, such as the nose and eyes."

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/kinect-will-recognise-sign-language