DailyDirt: Kinect Hacks Are Just Appetizers…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Microsoft Kinect is a cool platform that provides hints of future user interfaces that are touchless. Kinect is also being used in other projects, though, that could help advance the field of robotics. Here are some interesting Kinect links for everyone (while we wait for the Kinect platform to mature and really deliver cool stuff in the future).
- Microsoft Research has posted some videos describing how Kinect software visually perceives body parts. The paper explains how the software is a “decision forest” of decision trees that try to classify body parts based on a huge set of model body part images. [url]
- Kinect’s camera hardware can also be useful for robot visualization projects. Standardized sensor hardware that is relatively cheap could potentially give robot vision projects a little boost. [url]
- Robot vision projects, in turn, could help blind people with advanced assistive devices. Strapping a laptop to a person’s back, though, might not be the best form factor for a device to assist the visually impaired. [url]
- There are several projects that hack together the Kinect and other techy gadgets. The OpenKinect community is growing and developing a few really cool projects. [url]
- Still, some gamers are complaining that Microsoft hasn’t released enough games that use the Kinect to its full potential. More games are expected to be announced at E3 later this year, but people with the hardware will have to wait several months for new Kinect-enabled games to be delivered to living rooms… [url]
- To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: kinect, openkinect, user interface, visualization
Companies: microsoft
Comments on “DailyDirt: Kinect Hacks Are Just Appetizers…”
Kinect
Do none of you really not know about tobii?? its been out for a very long time much earlier then kinect
Check it out here: http://www.tobiiati.com and here:www.tobii.com
Re: Kinect
And here we see a difference between a “Professional assistive and augmentative communication device” and “thing built from a mass-market home device”.
with just a quick look at the tobii website, i was interested in finding a cost, a pricepoint. Instead all i could find were references to medicare and financing and choices in dealing with your insurance provider.
A kinect costs a hundred twenty, hundred fifty bucks. Mayber that much again in interface gear, depending on what you do, plus free/open software to do it with.
No one is claiming this is a licensed/insured/approved device for any purpose, saving them from the “dealing with the medical industry” bloat that turns pricing into a shell game of subsidy and insurance.
Re: Re: Kinect
agreed, teka… kinect is cool b/c it’s a hackable platform. sure, there may be other devices that are better suited for specific tasks — but the point is that the kinect has volume production behind it, so it’ll be accessible to hobbyists who might want to tinker with it.