Kinect Hacked, Adafruit Bounty Won 262
scharkalvin writes "Adafruit has announced a winner to their bounty for an open source driver for the MS Kinect. From the article: 'We have verified that it works and have a screenshot from another member in the hacking community (thanks qdot!) who was also able to use the code. Congrats to Hector! He's running all this on a Linux laptop (his code works with OpenGL) and doesn't even have an Xbox!'" We talked about Adafruit's bounty yesterday.
Wow... (Score:3)
Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
Making stuff work is a crime.
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Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
"If the hacker only released a driver that works without altering the Kinect module in any way, MS can say what they want but they don't have much legal standing."
Why the hell would they have any standing if he did alter it? It belongs to him, not MS!
Hell, he could pull it apart, rewire it, reflash things...
What the hell happened to I bought it, it's mine ?? If I want to use it as a doorstop I will, if I figure out a way to cannibalise a sensor in it for some other purpose, I will. If I want to paint it green and shove it up my arse, I will.
FFS what's wrong with this planet?
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By plugging this hardware in you agree to the terms of the license...........
No: only by signing a license agreement, I agree with the terms of the license.
Re:Tampering! (Score:4, Informative)
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A license cannot supersede law.
Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
The box of my Kinect actually said, and I quote: Requires acceptance of software license agreement available in manual and at: www.xbox.com/sla. You accept by using the Kinect Sensor and your Xbox 360.
It's a good thing I never used my Kinect Sensor with my Xbox 360 since I don't own an Xbox 360 :)
Re:Tampering! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
Making stuff work is a crime.
Only in the land of the free. In other "less free" places it's not a crime. Yet.
Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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They are likely pissed because Microsoft is likely still in the "We are subsidizing this hardware to ensure a market footprint for the XBox" mode and every Kinetic sold today that isn't used to play Gears of Violence is money out of their pocket with zero 'return'.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Interesting)
Tampering with demand! (Score:2, Interesting)
Can they do that now? Remember so far the only (speculative) demand is for the cheaper Kinect. Has open source drivers and out of band usage for the Wiimote increased measurable sales?
Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
Primesense [primesense.com] created, presumably holds patents on, and did the reference design for, the "Kinect" camera/IR projector range mapping stuff. MS didn't buy them, they just bought/licenced enough of their stuff to produce Kinect hardware.
It is quite possible that Primesense also sells one or more much expensive motion capture solutions/SDKs/whatever based on the same technology; but agreed to give MS a sweet deal, in $/unit terms, because of the number of units expected to sell.
If the Kinect becomes generally useful, with independently produced drivers, anybody will be able to buy an instance of PrimeSense's fancy tech for $150 at any gamestop.
Consider an example from the old days: the first "Airport" cards were actually just rebadged Lucent gear; but with the pins deliberately switched around so that they would be incompatible with a PCMCIA slot. The Lucent branded equivalents were more expensive; but worked with normal PCMCIA slots. Obviously Lucent wasn't taking a loss on the "airport" cards; but they were having it both ways: sell a bunch of units to well-heeled consumers via Apple; but don't cannibalize the deep-pocketed connected enterprise market, thanks to deliberate incompatibility. There could be something similar going on here.
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Although the Kinect is apparently not subsidised [lazygamer.net], I completely see your point. They were projecting every Kinect as including $x in additional software sales as well as the $y profit on the hardware, and I totally understand why they're pissed about not getting that $x that they were hoping for.
If it's not subsidised, then they're fucking retarded...absolutely bat-shit fucking crazy if you're right and they're pissed about that...
They are making ($y + $x) * 100,000s to owners of xbox360s...
With the advent of this hack, they are making an additional $y * 100s/1,000s of hackers/indie game developers/indie gamers/performance artists etc. etc. who would not have otherwise bought one.
If they argue that those hackers/indie gamers would have gone out and bought an xbox360 and 10 games were it n
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For a car analogy, many boy racers like to put Lexus headlight/tail-light clusters on their cars...for...whatever reason. Microsoft's reaction is as stupid as Lexus trying to stop non-Lexus owners from buying their headlight/tail-light clusters because they want them to go out and buy a Lexus.
They don't expect them to go out and buy a lexus, it's that they don't want a signature part of their premium brand associated with some 17-year-old's beaten up shitbox car.
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Although the Kinect is apparently not subsidised [lazygamer.net], I completely see your point. They were projecting every Kinect as including $x in additional software sales as well as the $y profit on the hardware, and I totally understand why they're pissed about not getting that $x that they were hoping for. That wasn't my point - their motivation in wanting to prevent the Kinect being used as a standalone device is clear.
Makes me want to cry for Sony as well for selling their console at a loss. What's even funnier is when someone takes said console (USAF)...buys thousands of them and sets them up for not playing games. Those bastards! The USAF should know better than to steal from a company they know is losing money on every console they buy. Buying thousands...our government owes Sony BIG!
We...as consumers...should use said product in the only way the company likes. Our corporate leaders want no more from us than to fo
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Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Interesting)
The response from MS is probably just a kneejerk PR response to someone contacting them and saying "what's your position on someone fiddling with your devices".
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They are likely pissed because Microsoft is likely still in the "We are subsidizing this hardware to ensure a market footprint for the XBox" mode and every Kinetic sold today that isn't used to play Gears of Violence is money out of their pocket with zero 'return'.
Well, something is wrong with their business model then. Tough luck.
BTW, in some countries (like... Belgium), it is forbidden to sell a product at a loss (except for clearing old stocks).
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That's probably why Belgium is such a dominant global power.
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It seems to me that Belgium is punching above its weight.
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Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Air Force had plans to build an HPC cluster using about 2,500 PS3s plus spares. Air Force Unhappy With Removal of Linux from PS3 [tomshardware.com]
That sort of thing takes a lot of product off retail shelves and it cannibalizes sales of your own HPC product.
Exit the OtherOS.
That lesson can't have been lost on Microsoft -- or anyone else in this business.
Re:Tampering! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they can't do anything about the amateur hackers, but I don't think that's the point. It's in their interest to make threatening announcements like this so that companies don't make a business out of poaching Kinects and rebadging/repurposing them essentially on Microsoft's dime. The point is to have a chilling effect on markets, not individuals directly. This isn't to say that this is a good or bad thing (let alone whether it's actually effective), but I suspect that amateur hardware hackers don't really significantly change the equation.
Of course the line between business and individual is blurry. Also, occasionally, a totally-amateur group gets whacked. I'd wager that this is mostly "mission creep", for example some overzealous newly-promoted True Believer looking for brownie points.
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If they'd just looked at pretty much any similar example in history to see that the open driver was inevitable, they could've played it in such a manner that they distanced themselves from supporting or condoning it, but congratulated the community for their innovation.
Four words: Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio [microsoft.com]
Microsoft should have realised the immense usefulness of this product in computer vision and robotics and just released an open source driver themselves. Even if they increased the shelf price of the device from US$150 to US$250, it's still way cheaper than any other commercial vision system out there.
Instead, their marketing department saw red and decided to threaten everybody. Idiots.
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Instead, their marketing department saw red and decided to threaten everybody. Idiots.
They threatened everybody?
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The M$ PR department has issued a correction please replace "product tamperers" with "pedo-vandals w/ WMDs"
Re:Tampering! (Score:4, Funny)
what the fuck is wrong with Microsoft?
As an aside, I should preemptively mention that I know this is /. but this was a rhetorical question.
Microsoft Wanted it that way (Score:5, Insightful)
"Using a linux laptop". . Now every geek that has avoided Microsoft and their products like the plaugue will be rushing out and buying Kinect controllers. .
Step One: Create a toy that will entise the Open Source crowd
Step Two: Wait for some one to get it to work on their linux box
Step Three: watch all the geeks and hobyists buy said toy
Step Four: Profit
Hacking is good for business.
Re:Microsoft Wanted it that way (Score:5, Insightful)
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What they said was "Suck my chair bitch, who run Ballmer town?"
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Step Four: Make a loss on every device sold and not recover it because these people aren't buying the games
FTFY
Re:Microsoft Wanted it that way (Score:4, Informative)
Kinect is net positive and not sold at a loss.
http://www.lazygamer.net/microsoft-will-make-a-profit-on-every-kinect-sold/
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???
Which in this case happens to be:
"Sell product with a reasonable margin"
But it appears that Kinect might actually be sold at a loss (sorry I see mixed reports)
Re:Microsoft Wanted it that way (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hi, this is the Red Ring of Death calling. Where have you been the last few years?
Any company that puts out electronics with more than low single digit failure rates, especially a flagship product, does not make good hardware.
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I've had an original 360 for years and years and years, and I still have no idea what that was all about. Mine doesn't even get particularly warm - proper ventilation and care goes a long way.
I have never even had a glitch with it, in fact, aside from one non-reproducible graphics error in Fallout 3.
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All they really have to do is make another crappy Halo sequel using Kinect and 90% of Xbox owners will have one anyway.
Kinect Tamper-Resistance (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always wondered about that statement - did Microsoft really mean people hacking Kinect the hardware, or did they refer to the new round of cracking going on in the Xbox360 community after Microsoft rolled out the Fall Update?
After all, iFixit's tear down doesn't reveal any anti-tamper mechanisms - no potting of circuit boards or anything. Unless they meant firmware hacking to try a USB jailbreak for the 360, but that's simple to do without needing a $150 piece of equipment.
The Fall update did bring out anti-modded-Xbox protection measures. Backup games fail a new check and the results get reported back to Microsoft, who can institute a new round of console bans (but only if you're stupid enough to connect to Live with your modded Xbox360). I'm just wondering if some new PR person got the explanation all jumbled up or something between the engineers, legal and PR made a very interesting game of telephone.
I can see how going from "The software update we rolled out for Kinect contains new anti-piracy measures" into "Microsoft takes strong measures against those who tamper with Kinect". Or how a simple query by someone asking for drivers to Microsoft gets turned into a request for the Xbox360 software itself leading to silly statements. Add in 20 layers of management that the message gets filtered through and it's what you end up with.
Re:Kinect Tamper-Resistance (Score:5, Informative)
What the Kinect does have is anti-cloning. The Kinect cryptographically authenticates itself to the 360 (but not the other way around, as far as I can tell). In other words, it should be very hard to clone, but this doesn't affect efforts to use it outside of the original Xbox platform.
It seems to me like the people in charge of those Microsoft PR statements don't really know what they're talking about. Sure, there's some "security" around the Kinect (in the general sense of anti-cloning and associated Xbox updates), but as far as I can tell, no effort has been made to prevent DIY use like this. Getting it to work was comparable to getting any other proprietary USB device to work: an exercise in reverse engineering and traffic replaying, but there were no deliberate obstacles along the way.
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Anti-cloning makes more sense than anything really. What does microsoft REALLY care if you use a kinect with your Linux PC? Or even your windows PC.
They would, however, want to stop people selling knock-off kinect peripherals. (Whether they should be able to even do that is a separate question, but at least one can see why they'd be motivated to.)
Re:Kinect Tamper-Resistance (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft probably cares very much if Kinect sales are not perceived in the marketplace as indicative of the Xbox 360 Kinect-using market, since the market penetration of the Xbox360+Kinect combo is a point to use in getting devs to make games for that combo.
If one person does it, sure, they don't care. But if it is perceived as being widespread, they certainly care. Which means if it is being covered in a public forum with substantial exposure, they have a strong incentive to respond to it.
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Re:Kinect Tamper-Resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the problem might be replacing Kinect with a different device presenting itself as Kinect to XBox. This way you'd gain unfair advantage in online games - where your fitness, physical condition and body momentum would restrict you normally, you could use, say, a key to deliver lightning fast kicks, or duck to the ground faster than gravitational acceleration would normally let you.
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Not that much of a problem - Kinect is sold just above costs, and if it sells more games, the goal has been achieved.
Here come the patent threats... (Score:2, Redundant)
What'll you bet that Microsoft rushes out a new, less hackable version. There aren't so many of these in the field that it wouldn't be worth their while. Or are they just planning on using patent takedowns to make it illegal to work with the data stream produced by a Kinect box?
Which brings up an interesting (to me, at least) topic. Once you buy a product that legally implements a patent, aren't you implicitly granted a license to use that patent? To me, if you have, for example, a license to have an ex
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I get that, but I'm not sure why the patent office allows it. It's anti-competitive, and double-charging. Sure, if they can get away with it, they will.
In the case of exchange, I'm licensing both pieces of software. Who's to say which piece implements the patent? At some point interoperability demands that wire protocols be implementable, and as long as I'm a paid-up exchange user, I shouldn't have to pay again to implement it.
And in the case of codecs, the value of the patented idea ought to be the qua
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Simple, the EULA protects the closed-source vendors, not you, the consumer from "misuse" of their shitty product. Every EULA is essentially a list of occurrences that they did not, would not, or could not code for, as well as a promise that you, the consumer, are the vendor's personal bitch and you aren't really allowed to use their products in the first place, but since you paid they'll let you for a limited time, until they can get you to upgrade to the next closed-release of their POS software. THIS is
Re:Here come the patent threats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or Microsoft won't do anything to stop this since they really don't care.
Really Important For Hobby Robotics! (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Indoor localization (figure out where you are inside)
2. Indoor navigation
3. Table top manipulation
There are already open source software packages for all of these items, but they require very expensive laser scanners (starting at 5K a pop). Most of these lasers only scan one row at a time, which means that for situations where you want 3D, you have to tilt the scanner up and down. This is a hassle and leads to slow scan times, which reduces the responsiveness of the robot.
For indoor localization, what you really want is just a line of points at a fixed height (you could extract one row of Kinect depth pixels) that you can feed to particle filers to figure out position in a mapped space. You might also be able to use opensource SLAM software, wheel encoders, and a Kinect to make 2D and 3D maps of indoor environments.
For indoor navigation, you can use 2D navigation planners to figure out plans through maps, and then use indoor localization to follow the plans. The Kinect can serve as an obstacle detector in addition to the providing data to the localizer. For example, if a person or animal jumps in front of the robot, the Kinect will sense it, and allow the robot to stop instantly and plan a new route. With a tilting laser, the reaction time would be slower, because laser might be in an orientation where it does not see the obstacle.
For table top manipulation, the Kinect can provide a point cloud of the objects on the table. CV software can remove the background (table, wall, etc.) and then detect the objects on the table. Once this is done, motion planners can plan a route for an arm or other manipulator to pick up objects on the table.
Once we have all three of these systems, it should not be all that hard to link them together and start actually doing useful things with robots in our homes. Even just the first two would make it possible useful cleaning and sentry robots.
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This is somewhat possible without the depth field, but vastly more accurate (and easy) with it.
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It should be pretty easy to use inter-frame correlations to scan an object in 3D just by rotating it in front of the camera if you do it slowly enough. The only problem would be that your fingers would be scanned as well. You'd probably have to do two runs with different finger positions and combine them.
The only possible caveat would be the depth resolution of the camera. From the video, you can see that there's a pretty large minimum distance, how accurate is the sensor at that range?
Can I ask what in the hell is wrong with you? (Score:5, Funny)
Once we have all three of these systems, it should not be all that hard to link them together and start actually doing useful things with robots in our homes. Even just the first two would make it possible useful cleaning and sentry robots.
We theoretically approach useful home robotics, and your first thought is cleaning? Followed by sentry duties? What about the ole in-out-in-out, man? Where in the hell are your priorities?
"Cleaning." I swear some people are just too happy to announce to the world "Hey, look at me! I have zero sense of imagination! Look how practical I am!"
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All I'm saying is, when I see a Roomba, I think "Sure, the room looks great, but man is this thing lousy at giving decent head."
If 3D depth perception can correct this design flaw, then I know where I'm putting my R&D money. Capiche?
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On the later, if anyone thinks that $150 pays all costs on this thing they are out of their mind. I think on hardware we are used to MS not transferring development costs to the consumer. However, the xBox is a successful product, so I think we are going to see more of MS
Should we buy one before Microsoft clamps down? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fellow Slashdotters, your opinion on this please: now that the Kinect is actually useful, for how long do you think they will be available before Microsoft changes something so that the open-source drivers don't work?
I want to know whether to go buy one now before Microsoft retires the current model and starts putting other models out with new firmware that won't work with the drivers.
Currently I don't have any use for one, but I do have a bit of disposable income, and wonder whether it would be useful to s
OK now bring on the PS3, Wii,Linux and indie games (Score:2)
<evil grin>
If I were microsoft... (Score:2)
Id keep up my whining but do nothing, while I take notes on "innovative" ways to exploit the technology as people develop on it for free.
Then take their idea and if they complain, threaten them for breaking the EULA, or something along those lines.
Kinect's beginings included hacking Wii hardware (Score:2)
http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/06/12/0450237/Why-Natal-Is-a-Big-Deal [slashdot.org]
If I were MS, Sony, or Nintendo, I'd be paying close attention to people in the community that start doing interesting things with this and put them on my short-list for recr
Re:Kinect's beginings included hacking Wii hardwar (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a somewhat different thing from what Johnny Lee did, though. Johnny took existing Wiimote driver code and used it to do some very cool things with the data, such as his famous head tracking demonstration. He didn't figure out the actual communications protocol, though (in fact, I did a lot of the early Wiimote reverse engineering hacks [youtube.com] too; I guess I have a thing for wacky game controllers!).
Unfortunately for us engineers and low-level hackers, the people actually finding practical algorithms and cool uses for these devices tend to get more attention than the people hacking the low-level details ;). I'm genuinely excited to see what computer vision experts can do with the raw Kinect data, though (I personally can't do much more than apply a cheap heat map to the data like I did in my video).
What about the other hardware (Score:2)
This is the camera and IR depth sensor but has anyone figured out how to talk to the microphones, electric motor and other stuff in there yet?
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Considering the unit is cheaper than building your own, or buying one. I'd say this is a good thing.
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Depth perception.
I wonder how well it would perform under horticultural LED lighting with no green emissions.
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are you suggesting you are a *cough* tomato plant *cough*?
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No, I'm suggesting it for the large horticultural production systems I design for large food production companies.
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then the follow-up question is.. why do those need depth perception in the form of stereoscopic vision instead of e.g. ultrasonic or laser range finding?
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Depth perception helps a bit when you have to look down long rows of channels.
I would have much rather had this camera with dual RGB sensors instead of one RGB and a depth/heat sensor for this purpose, however.
Re:Hey, congrats (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you didn't even watch the video. Well, it apparently knows depth/distance among other sensory data. Robotics applications should be obvious (as also stated in the video) but I'm sure there are pornographic uses as well.
Re:Hey, congrats (Score:5, Funny)
Just think.. your fav porn site can now see just how hard your spanking your monkey, and suggest videos based upon how much you enjoyed previous ones from that genre.
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My kingdom for modpoints.
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Nice, lets all remember that you were the first person to think of using a robot that watches how hard you spank it to determine what kind of dirty stuff you're into the most. Like a functional MRI for porn. You should slap a patent on that one.
It would be a little creepy though... Just don't make the robot too human-like or it could really distract.
Re:Hey, congrats (Score:5, Insightful)
Measure depth. And capture 4-channel audio with spatial location and echo cancellation (unconfirmed but likely). It also moves up and down and has an accelerometer. People are mostly interested in the depth thing, though.
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marcan, Will we have a wii port ? :)
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Congrats with the hack & bounty marcan! It seems that nothing is unhackable in your hands, well done!
Wrong question. (Score:3, Insightful)
The question should be:
"Now what exactly can this do that any shitty 18-axis joystick can't?"
That's the kind of data you receive on the cable. Just like with optical mice, you don't have access to raw imaging device output, only processed through the image recognition layer.
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The Kinect sends out two video feeds to be processed by the Xbox. One normal and the other a depth map.
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I wonder what would happen to a legal argument like "Hello. I've taken this device and stripped it down to the bare essentials. I have added a firewall to prevent it from connecting to any Microsoft owned server in any way. I no longer consider it to be a reasonable description of a Kinect. Now look at the cool stuff I've done with it..."
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Lets start with This Guy [youtube.com], which happens to work for Microsoft now.
Now considering that Kinect can track depth and location relative to Kinect placement, which is usually under the TV, it should be trivial to do the above head tracking minus the special headgear. In Fact, I would be surprised if a game doesn't do this with Kinect sometime in the future to simulate glasses free 3D that works on any TV. Now I know that Webcams now can do this (the droid does site is a real world example) but since they cant me
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Yes, all of the processing is pure software. The original prototype did that on a separate processor on the hardware, but they removed that to cut down on the per-piece price (sacrificing performance and accuracy in the process).
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The final device still does a ridiculous amount of processing onboard, compared to just about every other peripheral out there. In order to get the depth map, it has to analyze the IR picture (which is quite different from a depth map) and extract contour and depth info from the density of the IR point cloud. This is being done in the PrimeSense SoC chip.
There is also a Marvell SoC chip in charge of audio processing and echo cancellation. I believe it might also be responsible for triangulation of the audio
Re:So... where's the motion sensing? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, but its a linux laptop. I've never gotten a webcam to work on a linux laptop. I can't even get it to sleep when I close the lid...
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You're closing it wrong.
Oh, shoot, wrong product...
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Hey genius!
https://github.com/JoshBlake/OpenKinect [github.com]
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OpenKinect
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