Kinect for Windows to launch in February. Microsoft has announced that it will be releasing a Windows PC version of its Kinect motion control device in February.
The camera and microphone peripheral was launched on Xbox 360 at the close of last year and has so far sold 18 million units. The PC version is set to retail at $249 (£160), over $100 more expensive than the console version, which Microsoft says has been effectively subsidised by the range of dedicated games available, as well as by Xbox Live subscriptions. Of course, many programmers have been using the Xbox version of the Kinect device with their PCs since the console launch of the product. The source code for the hardware is freely available, encouraging hundreds of research students, hackers and gadget fans to tinker with the hardware and come up with fascinating projects. Notable examples include a navigational device for the visually impaired and a system for providing surgeons with sensory feedback during remote operations.
Intuition, pleasure, and gestures. Scanning the Universe in 3D: The Hottest Kinect Video Yet? This video, featuring research with Kinect RGB “scans” of three-dimensional space, starts out innocently enough.
Microsoft’s depth-sensing camera gets pointed at the world, resulting in some very impressive 3D scans. Then you get about halfway through. For my part, at least, I nearly fell out of my chair. By constructing a 3D model out of the world it sees — even with wildly-shaking camera — the project is able to produce virtual 3D versions of things it sees. Add in textures, just after three minutes into the video, and things get really wild. If the team is out there, we’d love to talk to you. It’s beginning to look a lot like SIGGRAPH. “KinectFusion: Real-Time Dynamic 3D Surface Reconstruction and Interaction” Institutions: Microsoft Research Cambridge Imperial College London Newcastle University Lancaster University University of Toronto. Project Mimicry - playtest. List of Kinects Voice Commands - Forums. XBMC Kinect. Kinect with XBMC.
Kinect , IA & voice command interacting with xbmc. Kinect XBMC - Media Browsing Using Gestures. Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote. Top Kinect Hacks (So Far) « SlimGamer.com – Slim Means Nothing, Gaming Is Everything. Ever since the Kinect’s surprisingly lucrative success, independent developers around the world have been writing programs to tap into the device and try to unlock its true potential.
Here are some of my favourite Kinect hacks so far: Playing Minecraft with Kinect When you play Minecraft, what’s the first idea you think of when you think “What could make this game better?” Is it the fact that you should be able to place each individual block and mine each square of resource with your own arms? No! The Lightsaber Hack!! The Kinect hack that every geek and nerd in the world is most interested in is, of course, the interactive porn hack but until that comes out they can get their nerdgasms from the Lightsaber Hack. The mobile Kineck robot This is KinectBot! Optic Camo!! User TakayukiFukatsu has created this interesting little hack, where your body appears as if covered in Metal Gear Solid style optic-camo. Kinect Hacks: MIT gets Minority Report UI to work, look at those fingers go! MIGS 2010: Harmonix's Solution For Kinect UI Design. At this week's Montreal International Games Summit, Harmonix's Ryan Challinor discussed the difficult prototyping process for Dance Central's UI, which is fully-functioned and users preferred to any of Microsoft's own first-party Kinect titles.
When it comes to developing a Kinect UI, said Challinor, "things that seemed intuitive were impossible or really difficult to pull off," which disheartened the team working on the game. However, he said, Harmonix was able to create a UI where "you can do everything you can do in any other game. " The resulting UI tested significantly better than any of Microsoft's own games -- in a test of 432 users conducted by the company, two-thirds of users preferred it to any of the first-party launch titles, and over two thirds found Dance Central's UI "very easy" to navigate; none found it "very hard. " Challinor is a programmer who works exclusively on Harmonix's UI designs -- something he said was "usually... straightforward".
Several Issues Found In Kinect UI During Usability Breakdown. Jakob Nielsen 's Alertbox, December 27, 2010: Kinect Gestural UI: First Impressions Summary: Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog confirmations. But fun to play. Kinect is a new video game system that is fully controlled by bodily movements . Kinect observes users through a video camera and recognizes gestures they make with different body parts, including hands, arms, legs, and general posture. Leak shows Kinect-controlled Hulu Plus UI for Xbox. Images preview changes to Kinect Dashboard Shortly after Microsoft began pushing an Xbox 360 update to add Kinect support for the Netfix UI, image leaks now show equivalent functionality for the upcoming Hulu Plus interface.
The images, which were posted by Joystiq, point to a rotating menu that follows the same theme as the Netfix interface and Xbox Dashboard. The new menus allow users to navigate the video queue through hand gestures, rather than requiring the standard Xbox controller for input. The system also supports voice commands for basic playback controls.
Hulu Plus integration is expected to be added to the Xbox 360 sometime this spring. Gmail Motion BETA. Kimchi and Chips' blog » Blog Archive » Kinect + Projector experiments. Kinect Dashboard Interaction Demo! Xbox Kinect Dashboard Demo Video (HD) - Kinect for Xbox 360. TopShop Kinect (via @rubbishcorp) - FLIP MODE.