Hack Kinect, Win Money

[Direwolf750]

rulings could only be done every 3 years with the DMCA. do you not research these people? the earliest the ruling could come down on would be past 2012. The case against the hacker would be settled well before that.

restarted cause it was getting annoying. Yes, rulings can only be done every 3 years. THAT IS NOT WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT. the ruling HAS ALREADY BEEN PASSED in regards to jailbreaking. By rules of legal precedent, in the United States, a court case with a similar situation can be used as evidence in another one. I mentioned nothing in regards to a case being charged against a hacker, and I have no idea how you interpreted that.

What I was saying about research was that I was skeptical that the jailbreaking case was restricted to "phones" ALONE in the first place. I believe it extends to more than just the iphone, but I don't care enough to go find out. Please actually read what I am saying before you spew baseless crap about it.

it does not include consoles. why do you think the PS3 and xbox are not allowed to be jail broken? they would be banned from PSN/XBL because they modded the console. consoles do not share the same rights as phones. they even said that extending it to consoles will require another ruling in 3 years.

The kinect isn't a console. It's a suped up webcam.

 

[Direwolf750]

rulings could only be done every 3 years with the DMCA. do you not research these people? the earliest the ruling could come down on would be past 2012. The case against the hacker would be settled well before that.

restarted cause it was getting annoying. Yes, rulings can only be done every 3 years. THAT IS NOT WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT. the ruling HAS ALREADY BEEN PASSED in regards to jailbreaking. By rules of legal precedent, in the United States, a court case with a similar situation can be used as evidence in another one. I mentioned nothing in regards to a case being charged against a hacker, and I have no idea how you interpreted that.

What I was saying about research was that I was skeptical that the jailbreaking case was restricted to "phones" ALONE in the first place. I believe it extends to more than just the iphone, but I don't care enough to go find out. Please actually read what I am saying before you spew baseless crap about it.

it does not include consoles. why do you think the PS3 and xbox are not allowed to be jail broken? they would be banned from PSN/XBL because they modded the console. consoles do not share the same rights as phones. they even said that extending it to consoles will require another ruling in 3 years.

The kinect isn't a console. It's a suped up webcam.

yes but its a console addon, which makes it a essentially a console. it does not share the same rights as phones and cannot be jail broken for whatever reason.

no, that does not make it a console. the controlers are not a console. The chatpad is not a console. a memory card is not a console. a regular webcam mounted to a 360 is not a console. It isn't a console, it is not protected by those "rights". It may not share the rights of either one but it is just a piece of hardware. that's it. just hardware. not a console. and being banned from psn/xbl is not legal action, just stupidity. It doesn't make it illegal, and people aren't trying to jailbreak these to use with their xbox.

 

[feycreature]

Man. Usually attempts at corporate espionage are more, well, sneaky. I'm not sure whether to say "Dick move" or "High five." Yes, repurposing the camera you bought as part of the machine for your own personal use sounds totally legal. There may be a wrinkle I'm unaware of.

I don't think Adafruit is just doing this for the lulz though. The question is whether they'll be able to manufacture similar or identical hardware along with the software provided by their contest winner and effectively get first stab at or even create a market for which Microsoft provided the hardware specs and inspiration, if not the software. And -that- depends on whether patents on any of the hardware prevent them from using it or copies of it for profit.

I'm no expert on American patent laws (or any patent laws for that matter) and I don't know how basic or widespread the hardware is, so I have no idea of the final answers. Presumably Limor has thought about that. Or she felt like tweaking Bill Gates. With a name like Limor, who knows?

 

[CrystalShadow]

There is a HUGE difference between idea diffusion (company makes motion sensor that can read and output distance, which leads to someone else attacking the same problem with all-original ideas, making something quite different) and theft of an idea (taking apart a Kinect to build a product with the same technological makeup.)

The former is best exemplified by Microsoft and Sony seeing Nintendo build the Wii and thinking "OK, let's build our own motion-control devices". All-original products from MS's and Sony's engineers don't step on Nintendo's intellectual property (well, maybe Move does, but that would be like Nintendo suing Sega for putting a D-pad on the Master System or Ford suing GM for putting a steering wheel on the first Chevrolet. There's a limit to originality-vs-pragmatism.)

The latter is, in a word, illegal.

That's not what they're asking for though.

This is the same class of hacking as getting a Wii remote (or even a PS2 controller) working on something other than the console it was originally designed for.

In fact, considering what the Kinect hardware is, that won't even get you very far, since a lot of the work is in the software.

Being able to recognise faces, voices, skeletal movements? - That's all software. Hacking the hardware will teach you nothing about how microsoft is doing this.

From the basic specs I've seen, the Kinect hardware isn't even anything truly new; It's just orders of magnitude cheaper than the systems that inspired it.

To my knowledge, the kinect consists of:

4 Microphones. - (software processing allows you to use these to deal with background noise more effectively. - Hacking the hardware output doesn't give you any of the code involved unless there is firmware doing some pre-processing)

1 RGB camera - Nothing special here; It's just something akin to a webcam. Anything interesting it does is all in software.

1 Infrared camera + 1 Infrared projector - This is a variant of a well known system for determining object depth. High end systems typically project a laser grid which the camera can use to determine distances of objects by how the grid is distorted. In this case, it's an infrared pattern being projected and then picked up by the camera.
Again, unless there's firmware on the device itself doing some kind of pre-processing, it'd be done in software.
Even if there is hardware pre-processing, that would most likely do little more than turn the raw image data into a depth map so that it's easier to work with.

1 motor - The device contains some kind of electric motor that allows it to move up and down to track people more easily.

But the article suggests they're not after the content of the firmware, neither are they trying to make copies of the device itself.

Rather, they want to know how the kinect outputs data, so that it can be connected to devices other than a 360 console.

Knowing how the hardware is constructed is very helpful in trying to decipher what kind of information it would transmit, and how it would most likely be formatted.

But what the hardware puts out is likely to be fairly limited compared to the supposed features of kinect.

 

[EmilioG]

I made an account just to reply to this thread. What Adafruit is asking for is not the firmware. Adafruit is asking for drivers. Just drivers. What they want is so that you can plug the Kinect into you computer, install said drivers, and then use the Kinect to browse the web maybe, or do some work in Photoshop. Adafruit is not trying to manufacture and sell a competing product reverse engineered from the Kinect which would be illegal. This is a quote from their blog about their Open Kinect project:

"What do we (all) want?
Open source drivers for this cool USB device, the drivers and/or application can run on any operating system ? but completely documented and under an open source license. To demonstrate the driver you must also write an application with one ?window? showing video (640 x 480) and one window showing depth. Upload all of this to GitHub.

(from http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the-ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/)

The software that Adafruit is asking for is to read the output of the Kinect, in no way is it the software that is on the Kinect.
As a side note, the argument that this violates the patent is uninformed. If you look at Article 33 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, a patent provides the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for as long as patent lasts, usually 20 years. Writing drivers to allow the Kinect to work on a system that it is not specifically designed to work on in no way violates this.

 

[scienceguy8]

For all the possibilities they mention they think they can get out of Xbox Kinect You'd think 2.... heck $10,000.00 would be to little for the keys(ability to repeat the process of open sourcing)a Kinect device from a store.

It's a company specialising in hobby engineering, not in "real" commercial or scientific use. I highly doubt they make that much money to pay more.

I remember seeing a tour video of Adafruit Industries in which Limor mentions revenue in excess of $1 million before the year was even up. In addition to being able to offer rewards like this one, they are also able to afford both a laser etcher/cutter, and a pick and place machine for the rapid placement of very small surface mount electronic parts. Meanwhile, another company building open source electronic devices and kits in the same vein as Adafruit Industries, Sparkfun Electronics [http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php], is pulling in more than $10 million in revenue yearly. Trust me, "hobby" engineering is big business.

Besides, you can bet your ass that actual robotics and aerospace companies and research institutes have far, far more advanced stuff than the kinect lying around.

That's why I don't think it's a big deal, it's just a bunch of DIY-ers goofing around, nothing more.

Remember those two guys, one with the weird name and the other with the big glasses? I think their names were Wozniak and Gates. Pretty sure the entire home electronics industry was started by a couple "DIY-ers goofing around". While the big companies have millions to throw at the problems they want to solve, they are unwilling to share their progress with other companies. They hide behind patents and end user licenses to protect their work, but as a result their work doesn't get any better. Whereas you have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of makers, hackers, and garage engineers actively working on project of their own, sharing their work freely, and watching as their fellow makers expand upon the work, making it better. We are potentially looking at a revolution here. New industries and technologies born out of peoples garages whose source code is freely available to everyone. We are not goofing around here. We are making things, and we are making them better.

EDIT: just wanted to mention that someone has at least gained access to the Kinect's motor controls. No word on whether they also have access to the camera, depth sensor, or microphones yet.

 

[redisforever]

"Don't make us up it to $3k."

Wow, they have balls...