Spying On Our Walking Habits With Kinects, To Create Smarter Spaces. Microsoft unveiled the Kinect two years ago as an add-on for the Xbox. The infrared motion-detecting sensor was designed to enhance video games, to turn you, as Xbox puts it, into your own controller. But immediately, of course, researchers at MIT started hacking the things. A tool initially intended for your virtual dance moves on Michael Jackson: The Experience had obvious potential for scientists as well to study how people move through all kinds of scenarios and spaces.
Researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab figured the simple gadget--available for about $80 at the scientific warehouse of Best Buy--could change how scientists study all kinds of crowd behaviors in our increasingly congested cities. Tracking Pedestrians They bought some Kinects and mounted them on campus. “When you have this data, you can really use it to better design spaces for human interaction,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab. The Kinect Effect People Behaving Like Atoms. Microsoft Kinect system helps retailers measure store traffic. Kinect@Home. U.Va. Engineering IMPACT Magazine. Between November 2010 and January 2011, Microsoft sold 8 million units of the Kinect, a motion-sensing input device for the Xbox 360 video game console. This pace, an average of 133,333 units per day, earned it a Guinness World Record as the “fastest selling consumer electronic device” to date.
Andrew Adderley (SEI ’14) and Raymond Vargas (CS ’14) are part of a team funded by the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing to explore the use of the Kinect in industrial settings. Peter Beling, an associate professor of systems and information engineering, is leading the project. The industrial partners are Aerojet, Chromalloy, Newport News Shipbuilding, Rolls-Royce and Siemens. The researchers have two goals. The Kinect system projects a grid of infrared dots to determine the depth of every object in its field of view. They also explored using the Kinect as an alternative to the company’s current system of monitoring worker safety. FORTH Kinect 3D Hand Tracking Demo Tutorial. HandyPotter (Demo Video)