Yeah, taking things apart is cool. The guys from T3 magazine were invited over to Redmond to see Kinect in action, and they've got some shots of the internals for everyone to see.
Do I see three cameras? One for daytime, one for playing at night (and with the TV off), and one for the tHz spectrum (think "airport body scanner") so you can play nekkid UNO?
Ah snap you beat me to it, anyways, this pretty much explains why the damn thing cost $150 TO MAKE, which makes me think that MS should've released a wiimote and be done with it. Anyways, heres the article from T3: Kinect’s optical setup is what allows it to track your movements in real time. It’s ridiculously complicated and made up of tech that's been around for about 15 years, but allows for effects and functions that have only been available at huge expense up until very recently. It’s made of two main parts: a projector and an IR VGA camera. The former bounces out a laser (don’t worry, Microsoft insists it’s safe) across the entire field of play, which the camera picks up to separate you from your sofa on what’s called a ‘depth field.’ It’s essentially all the pixels that Kinect gets back as IR noise measured in varying colour dependant on how close they are to the system. That way bodies appear a bright shade of red, green etc, and things further away appear grey. The software takes this image and runs it through a host of filters so that Kinect can work out what’s a person and what’s not. The system follows a basic system of guidelines, such as ‘a body is from x-foot tall to x-foot tall’ and ‘a person has two arms and two legs’ to work out that your coffee table or dog aren’t extra players. It’s also taught to be able to pick you out if you’re wearing baggy clothes or have hair coming over your shoulders. When we saw this as the developers see it, it was impressively accurate at sussing out each body part (right shoulder, for example) from not much information. Once that’s sorted, it converts body part identification into a skeleton with moving joints. Kinect is preloaded with 200 common poses, so that it can fill in the blanks if you make a move that obstructs the cameras view of your entire skeleton. The only downside we could see was that fingers aren't mapped individually on the skeleton, meaning that those dreams holding a pretend gun and pulling the trigger for Kinect FPS games are over. The system does all this continuously at 30fps. What about that promo trailer where Kinect signs in players just by looking at them? We saw that work in real life. The reality is that you’ll need to go through an ‘enrolment’ process in for that to happen. It’s a short one, but works by mixing your skeletal measurements with some basic facial recognition software. Microsoft says that if you drastically change your appearance you’ll need to reenrol. Rest of it here
It's worth noting that this portion is done on the 360 and not on the camera. It was originally designed to be done by the camera but MS took out the processor and moved the work to the 360 (hence the sizable requirements needed on the CPU). Also from what I read, it seems a majority of the hw in the camera is over the mics as they do additional processing on the unit it self.
Actually I can't really find the motor in the pictures (unless it's the slim plastic piece between the camera PCB and another PCB. Which if that is the case then it's not eating up all that much space). http://www.t3.com/features-gallery.html?articleId=17763&pic=/images/insidekinect5.jpg&id=3 -edit- Actually due to how the device looks to pivot. It seems the motor is actually in side the base and not the main part of kinect (which would be the wise thing to do in the first place). http://www.t3.com/features-gallery.html?articleId=17763&pic=/images/insidekinect4.jpg&id=4
More and more I'm convinced MS made a bad move releasing kinect, its way too complex and costly to be an addon. Had Nintendo released the wiimote as a GC accesory it would have bombed, or nowhere near the popularity it had/has. IMO MS should've scrambled to get a wiimote for the X360 after TGS2005, when everybody went nuts for the thing: it would've been easier and way cheaper than kinect, and best of all in time to counter the wiicraze of 2007. The motion recognition technology of kinect which already existed before the X360 should've been left to the X720(or whatever) as part of the console itself, and not this.
I have some faith in Kinect Alot of kids are excited about it so fuck what us hardcore gamers think. it's the kids or more so the parents of these kids that make these companies money, not us old timers
It seems that a lot of games are "faking" player input to "appear" to work as intended. Any motion in the general direction is considered "correct" and the canned motion is played. The real issue here is the skeletal tracking which has been flaky since day one. Could be very cool - if it ever works as originally advertised
I've used one in person, and I can attest that it is, indeed, as cool as MS marketing makes it out to be. (and this was with a beta version!) Just stating it this way because I was also surprised at how well it worked.
Who cares if it works i think the big isue is price. It make work as intended as well but you look relly stupid playing the thing based on videos iv seen.
Well, I DO agree that if it's really that amazing to use and the games are at least playable, it might be big regardless of the price (after all the Wii was inferior to other nextgen and pricier than a GC).
I find the whole neural impulse input area much more exciting. If it was possible to combine that with something similar to Natal we'd actually have a worthwile new input that might last for more than one console generation - and it would also make gaming easier for handicapped people and us once we get old and rheumatic.
It wouldn't be that easy. First the Cameras them self only run at 30fps. Second the bulk of the processing is done on the 360 it self (MS took out the chips that did the work on kinect it self, what you see left is over audio input processing).
It's all done on the X360s G5, maybe the slim could be OC'd since it runs cooler, but older X360s?:-( Prepare for RRODcalypse!:evil:
