News - Kinect for Windows v1.5 software update coming in May

[HEXUS]

Brings support for joint tracking whilst sat down.

Read more.

[Hicks12]

small typo, first line "new Kindle" should be new "Kinect".

Good to see MS pushing the kinect, even if it will be defunct in a mere couple of years

[crossy]

Good to see MS pushing the kinect, even if it will be defunct in a mere couple of years

I'm guessing that you mean that this kind of tech will be built in somewhere (to monitors seems most obvious) rather than being added on like mice and keyboards are. Or are you meaning thought controlled interfaces (cue Twilight Zone theme...)

If MS can retool Kinect to work in a normal desktop type situation (so you're sitting down and close to the device - say <3ft) then I think that they'll sell in the truck loads, (esp if they do a white version for the folks in the Marketing departments). I'd love to be able to launch apps by voice or some kind of vague gesture to the screen (as opposed to the gestures flung at screen when said app crashes!) and being able to resize, move, etc by doing "multitouch" type gestures without touching the screen would be so Minority Report!

It might even make that Metro interface on Windows8 desirable ...

[Hicks12]

Oh no not like that, mind controlled devices are still a bit behind user integration. More the fact that the way kinect and other similar devices get their inputs are getting behind, following some interesting development here in England, its really going well and you should be seeing it in phones/cars/games consoles in the next year or two, depending on yields but its looking good for the future.

Currently though, kinect is one of the best home systems and if i had money spare and a specific use for it id grab one .

[Scribe]

small typo, first line "new Kindle" should be new "Kinect".

Good to see MS pushing the kinect, even if it will be defunct in a mere couple of years

Haha ta, this is from writing the Kindle article just before, the 'K' key association became habit.

[edvinasm]

Isn't this device a resource hog?

[mikerr]

Asus have already been demoing it built into laptops, it may well become as common as the webcam
i.e. built into everything, it's really "just" two webcams and IR lights anyway.

I've already seen kinect clones, doesn't microsoft have a patent on it at all ?

[crossy]

Asus have already been demoing it built into laptops, it may well become as common as the webcam i.e. built into everything, it's really "just" two webcams and IR lights anyway.
I've already seen kinect clones, doesn't microsoft have a patent on it at all ?

I thought the Kinect "bar" had some local processing capability too - in addition to the motor plus control for that.

Not sure how much of this MS has covered with patents - wasn't Apple busy generating patents for something that looked like a rehash of it recently?

Only last month, Microsoft released the first official, Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0, paired with a new Kinect, targeted directly at PC usage, featuring a 'near mode' for operating only 40cm from the device and support for four Kinects to be used simultaneously.

Shame that they had to do a new Kinect box - rather than some retrofit for the existing units. Got to say that I'd use my Kinect (on XBox) a good deal more if I could sit closer to it - be good to watch iPlayer etc using the gesture and voice controls.

Strikes me that if they can integrate this into Windows8 - and add some speech recognition - then it'll be an easy sell to the Facebook/Twitter generation.

[Scribe]

I thought the Kinect "bar" had some local processing capability too - in addition to the motor plus control for that.

It's all based off PrimeSense technology, which ASUS also licenses, if there is any processing on the 360 Kinect, it's certainly not necessary, though perhaps it kept performance up on the 360 itself?

You can see the ASUS version of the Kinect here:

http://www.asus.com/Multimedia/Motio...tion_PRO_LIVE/

It's much smaller and lighter due to a lack of a motor and powers off a standard USB.

The main issue is it relies on open source software OpenNI for its functionality, which can be extended with various middlewares, for example, PrimeSense NITE adds the familiar Kinect-style gesture support.

I actually integrated the gesture and hand movement system into the Torque game engine a while back, it's fairly easy to use software but, it's not going to work with the Kinect SDK and that's the real issue.