Kinect - Never before seen technology? Get real Microsoft!

[Asdalan08]

I know it may not have made an impact and i'm not usually one to get angry at video game companies... (generally because I laugh at other people when they do)

But a little alarm clock that has been ticking for ages was finally set off when I heard, and I quote. "The newest technology on the market, we've never seen anything like it!"
This ofcource was some woman refering to the new Xbox Kinect, but what some people fail to realise is that the PLAYSTATION EYETOY did the same thing, maybe not to the same extent, as the Kinect does and came BEFORE it. Sure you can copy other companies, Playstation Move - Wiimote, but claiming that it is YOUR new idea and has NEVER been seen before. That's just wrong.

(Personally I prefer the Eyetoy but I'm a Playstation fanboy)

 

[The Human Torch]

If you have a tendency to get angry about every PR talk, you are not going to have many quiet, peaceful moments during your day.

 

[LornMind]

Not so sir. "Technology" here is referring to the capabilities of the Kinect. Although it does seem like a glorified EyeToy, the tech behind it was woefully weak for the most part. The concept is the same, camera that translates movement into a game, but the tech, the nuts and bolts behind it, could be entirely different.

Sounds weird, but imagine this. Sony's eye toy runs off a hamster running in a wheel. Kinect runs of a fairy pouring gasoline into an engine. The technology is different. The concept, is not. Or maybe I'm totally wrong.

Just to hedge my bets.

 

[DeepComet5581]

Everyone wants to get a step ahead of the competition. Sony can't do what Microsoft have done because of, as you rightly pointed out, the Wiimote. However, I have never heard of the Eyetoy, and i'm sure quite a few others haven't either. Maybe Microsoft were hoping to capitalise on this (At least until Sony comes out and says it's just like Eyetoy, by which point the Cash Cow would have given it's milk, and it won't matter).

 

[CrystalShadow]

Few things are really 'new' anyway.

You think the eyetoy itself was anything truly amazing?

It's just a webcam with some fancy software. It's just that Sony made it possible to do some interesting stuff with it and still get it to run on what is essentially fairly cheap hardware.

Similarly, the Wiimote is merely a 3 axis accelerometer.

That tech has been around since the 1970's, but it wasn't affordable to use it for anything but the most expensive research and military or navigation systems.

It's only 'new' in the sense that it's the first time it's been used in a cheap electronic entertainment device.

(Well, aside from tilt controllers, but those were almost useless, and usually based around mercury reed switches. You think the Wii remote can be dodgy at times? You've obviously never tried one of these 'tilt' controllers.)

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Not so sir. "Technology" here is referring to the capabilities of the Kinect. Although it does seem like a glorified EyeToy, the tech behind it was woefully weak for the most part. The concept is the same, camera that translates movement into a game, but the tech, the nuts and bolts behind it, could be entirely different.

Sounds weird, but imagine this. Sony's eye toy runs off a hamster running in a wheel. Kinect runs of a fairy pouring gasoline into an engine. The technology is different. The concept, is not. Or maybe I'm totally wrong.

Just to hedge my bets.

The thing that Kinect does, if we skip past most of the bullshit about "finding your skeleton" and what have you is simply do what we always assumed could be done with enough power and the right kind of data: it maps 3D space in real time.

The eye Toy, no matter how much power you give it, can accomplish this. One camera gives you two dimensions of depth and collapses the third. You need a second sensing device.

While what Kinect does might not seem incredible, it actually is quite a feat. Using a nothing more than visual information provided by a pair of cameras the system can, in real time, pick one or more objects out of a given space and follow it as it moves around. That doesn't sound fancy I'm sure but consider for a moment how you would describe a process by which that occurs. Any method I can think of is so computationally expensive that it could never happen in real time.

So, yes I do think the technology of the Kinect is impressive. I even think that it will eventually represent an important step in the process of designing interfaces. I just don't think that, in it's current state, it is a proper or useful interface for most games.

 

[tahrey]

Never mind the eyetoy, the old logitech etc webcams were doing that on the pc even earlier ... i remember having a minor RAGE over -Sony- pretending it was something new.

This sort of thing actually happens all the time though. Apple are particularly egregious offenders... don't worry about it.


edit: OK, so the Kinect has two cameras and can identify objects in 3D space... woo. OK, that brings it up to the level that experimental robots have been at for ages, and even if I can't go back any further with ease I can definitely bring up an episode of James May's Big Ideas from a year or more ago that shows a pretty advanced one. So, Microsoft certainly didn't come up with the tech. Just, as was noted for the Wii, are the first to put it in a cheap, ultimately completely useless device. (Heck, even the Wii wasn't the first on the _cheap_ front... pretty sure you could get accelerometers in a number of affordable things like iPhones, GPS units, in-car dynos and the like before it came along. There's not a great deal to the device after all. Even my cheap rubbish phone has them built in _and the makers haven't even made full use of it in the default software_. That's right, it's so cheap that it's more expensive to delete it from the hardware than just ignore it)

 

[Danzaivar]

Actually it's more like the motion capture they use in movies and game-making. Eyetoy only captured your silhouette, totally different. Though for a lot of people they see a camera and just go "hey, we've already had a camera!".

What would be amazing is if people can jerry rig it to feed the data into a pc, use it as a budget motion capture device for animating characters in games. 3D games development gets a whole lot easier for amateurs.

 

[Unrulyhandbag]

playstation eyetoy = Playstation Move - Wiimote.

actually the eyetoy was move minus the buttons and gyroscope it could do everything the wii can minus the buttons

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zin-gK6NEIY[/video]

makes the dev time for the move look a bit silly but the gyro, accelerometers and buttons are a vast improvement in feel.

Kinetics software is tech seen quite often in robotics labs since the mid nineties and now found in the open robot operating system. oROS can recognise and learn objects, assign a skeleton to a human, run face recognition, spatial awareness and a ton more using just two cameras and a fairly cheap processor, sound familiar?(just got it running on my Lego robot...kinda it's really flaky at the mo might take me a few months to get working right and I know I can't do everything at once)

So never before seen tech? no.

 

[LornMind]

Not so sir. "Technology" here is referring to the capabilities of the Kinect. Although it does seem like a glorified EyeToy, the tech behind it was woefully weak for the most part. The concept is the same, camera that translates movement into a game, but the tech, the nuts and bolts behind it, could be entirely different.

Sounds weird, but imagine this. Sony's eye toy runs off a hamster running in a wheel. Kinect runs of a fairy pouring gasoline into an engine. The technology is different. The concept, is not. Or maybe I'm totally wrong.

Just to hedge my bets.

The thing that Kinect does, if we skip past most of the bullshit about "finding your skeleton" and what have you is simply do what we always assumed could be done with enough power and the right kind of data: it maps 3D space in real time.

The eye Toy, no matter how much power you give it, can accomplish this. One camera gives you two dimensions of depth and collapses the third. You need a second sensing device.

While what Kinect does might not seem incredible, it actually is quite a feat. Using a nothing more than visual information provided by a pair of cameras the system can, in real time, pick one or more objects out of a given space and follow it as it moves around. That doesn't sound fancy I'm sure but consider for a moment how you would describe a process by which that occurs. Any method I can think of is so computationally expensive that it could never happen in real time.

So, yes I do think the technology of the Kinect is impressive. I even think that it will eventually represent an important step in the process of designing interfaces. I just don't think that, in it's current state, it is a proper or useful interface for most games.

Oh, it's rather impressive, I agree with that. Provided it works well.

I hope I didn't come across as saying the technology wasn't impressive or lame or something, I was just making a funny point with that whole hamster wheel/fairy gasoline analogy.