Hasta La Gadget!

CEDIA is a wrap, but Richard still has lots to recap about the show. Plus, he’s got time to kill until Grand Theft Auto Online’s connectivity issues get sorted. And Ben? Well, he’s frustrated with his Fantasy Football picks, because they aren’t operating at peak performance. Get to streaming this week’s Engadget HD Podcast below.

Hosts: Ben Drawbaugh, Richard Lawler

Producer: Joe Pollicino

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Earlier this week I traveled to Microsoft’s Mountain View campus to play with the company’s new Kinect sensor. While there I met with a few of the team’s engineers to discuss how they had built the new device.

Up front, two things: The new Kinect sensor is far cooler than I expected. Also, I touched an Xbox One.

The story of the Kinect device, both its first and second generations, has been a favorite Microsoft narrative for some time, as it fuses its product teams and basic research group in a way that demonstrates the potential synergy between the two.

The new Kinect sensor is a large improvement on its predecessor. Technically it has a larger field of vision, more total pixels, and a higher resolution that allows it to track the wrist of a child at 3.5 meters, Microsoft told me. I didn’t have a kid with me, so I couldn’t verify that directly.

It also contains a number of new vision modes that the end user won’t see, but are useful for developers who want to track the human body more precisely and with less interference. They include a depth mode, an infrared view, and new body modeling tools to track muscle use and body part orientation.

When in its depth image mode, acting as a radar of sorts, each of the 220,000 pixels that the Kinect sensor supports records data independently. The result is a surprisingly crisp mapping of the room you are in.

The new Kinect also contains a camera setting that is light invariant, in that it works the same whether there is light in the room or not. In practice this means you can Kinect in the dark, and that light pollution – say, aiming two floodlights directly at the sensor – doesn’t impact its performance. I did get to test that directly, and it worked as promised. No, I don’t know the candlepower of the light array we used, but it was enough to suck staring into directly.

So, developers can now accept motion data from the Kinect without needing to worry about the user being properly lit, or having their data go to hell if someone turns on the overhead light, or time sets the sun. The new Kinect also supports new joints in its skeletal tracking, in case you need to better watch a user’s hands move about.

The smallest object the first Kinect could detect was 7.5 centimeters. The new Kinect, while executing a 60 percent larger field of view, can see things as small as 2.5 centimeters. And it can track up to six people, from two before.

The first Kinect device became the fastest-selling consumer device in history. Its existence helped keep the Xbox 360 relevant, even as the console aged. Microsoft is releasing a new Kinect sensor with its upcoming Xbox One. Both go on sale November 22 and will compete with Sony’s soon-to-be-released PlayStation 4.

Origins

For a one-year generational update, I feel like the new Kinect is worthy progress on its predecessor. I sat down with Microsoft’s Sunil Acharya, Travis Perry, and Eyal Krupka to track the origins of how the new hardware was designed. It’s a short story of collaboration, akin to what came together for the original Kinect device.

Most basically, Microsoft wanted to place a “time-of-flight” camera into the new Kinect. Such a device works by measuring the time it takes for light that it emits to return. Given that speed is a bit quick, and the new Kinect wanted to absorb a massive field of data in real-time, challenges cropped up.

Two of our aforementioned Softies, Eyal from Microsoft Research’s Israel group, and Travis from the mother corporation’s Architecture and Silicon Management team, collaborated on turning time-of-flight from a more academic exercise into a commercial product. Input came from what Microsoft described to me as “multiple groups” to improve the camera.

Working as a cross-team group, the time-of-flight problem was essentially solved, but it led to another set of issues: data overload and blur.

In short, with 6.5 million pixels needing processing each second, and a requirement to keep processing loads low to ensure strong Xbox One performance, the Kinect group was pretty far from out of the soup. Algorithms were then developed to reduce processor hit, ‘clean up’ edge data to prevent objects in the distance from melting into each other, and to help cut down on motion blur.

According to Eyal, executing those software tasks was only made possible by having the camera “set” earlier in the process. If the hardware hadn’t been locked, the algorithms would have learned from imperfect or incorrect data sets. You want those algorithms to learn on the final data, and not on noisy data, or beta data, he explained.

That hardware is multi-component, including an aggregation piece (Microsoft was vague, but I think it is a separate chip) that collects the sensor data from the Kinect and pools it. Microsoft declined to elaborate on where the “cleaning” process takes place. I suspect that as the firm noted on its need to keep processing cycles low for the incoming data, it at least partially takes place on the console itself.

The end result of all of the above is a multi-format data feed for the developer to use in any way they wish. Microsoft spends heavily on the more than 1,000 developers and Ph.D.s that it employs at Microsoft Research who are free to pursue long-term research that isn’t connected to current products. But it does like to share when those lengthy investments lead to knowledge that it applies to commercial devices, such as the Kinect.

What to take from this? Essentially that even before the re-org, Microsoft had at least some functional intra-party collaboration in place. And, that a neat device came out of it.

The next challenge for the team? Make it smaller.

It’s no secret that Bing has been waging an uphill battle to stay relevant, and now, Microsoft is hoping that its partnership with Pinterest will be enough to win you over. The Bing team’s latest effort combines its own search results with a new feature: image collections, a supplement that presents related Pinterest boards to the right of your main results. For example, an image search for “Pink cupcakes” will pull up a list of boards relevant to your interests. Clicking on one of them — we opted for “Pretty in pink cupcakes” — will take you to a new page that collects the user’s pinned images along with a direct link to the board on Pinterest. The new feature is designed to introduce a social element to Bing by uniting collections curated by living, breathing humans with the search engine’s algorithms. We don’t know if it’ll be enough to convince people to “Bing it” next time they’re on the hunt for images, but we do know that we’re now in desperate need of cupcakes.

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Bing

Did messing with the surface of the moon mess with Earth's climate?

(Credit: NASA)

Last week, the latest IPCC report on climate change said it’s “extremely likely” that humans are to blame for our warming planet, which has been playing host to increasingly freaky and extreme weather in recent years.

The evidence in the report is convincing, but doesn’t answer the next logical question: specifically, which humans are to blame?

Before you go shouting about coal-fired power plants and the Americans and the Indians and the Chinese, let me clarify the question even further. Who are the actual individual people that set into motion a chain of events that has led to melting permafrost, epic hurricanes, and the past really disturbing year here in the Rocky Mountains, where we’ve been plagued by wildfires followed by floods.

I mean seriously, WTF?! Who’s responsible here? I want names!

It wasn’t until this weekend, when I was reporting on one NASA scientist’s notion to slam a used asteroid into the moon after we’re done studying it, that my memory was jogged and I realized that I may be one of the few people able to provide su… [Read more]

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Dell rounded up a slew of journalists in New York today to show off a number of new gadgets — including some shiny new XPS notebooks and convertibles — but the company is finally making good on promises of a big tablet push. And among that portfolio of tablets are two low-cost options that run Android.

Really, Dell? I spent a little hands-on time with the new $149 Venue 7 and $179 Venue 8, and came away more than a little puzzled.

Dell’s press presentation was pretty light on details, but it soon became clear that the differences between the two were minor. The Venue 7 and 8 feature 7 and 8-inch IPS displays running at 1280 x 800 respectively, 2GB of system RAM, and 4G connectivity options if you’re hard up for some roadside internet access. The only other differences of note were the clock speeds of the Intel Clover Trail chips nestled inside the tablets — the 7-inch model has a processor clocked at 1.6GHz while its big brother features a slightly snappier 2.0GHz chip. Throw in a largely untouched build of Android 4.2.2 and you’re off to the races.

But what was it like to actually use them? Long story short: not bad, but far from great at the same time. They at least feel nicer than you’d expect — I think they’re more comfortable to grip than the Nexus 7 — and they’re fetching in a simplistic sort of way. And thanks to Intel’s chips and the 2GB of RAM, I didn’t have too many complaints as I fired up apps and tried to load some websites either.

The biggest issue I noticed was a lack of sensitivity on some of the devices while I poked and prodded at their screens: it occasionally took multiple attempts to successfully bring up the App Launcher or return to the home screen. I suspect that’s all because of non-final hardware or software, but it was alarming enough that it managed to sour me on the experience a hair. The Venues’ cameras were awfully iffy too, though that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Images looked grainy and undersaturated, so stick to your smartphone and you’ll be better off.

Those minor misses are either addressable through software or just par for the course for tablets in this price range. The big problem that Dell will almost assuredly deal with is that fact that these two tablets are totally and utterly adequate.

They’ll get the job done, and by all accounts, they’ll get the job with with a minimum of headaches. But for whatever reason, Dell seems to think that a strictly solid Android tablet will be enough to make them a notable player in the space, and I’m not convinced they’re right.

Now it should be noted that Dell isn’t exactly a stranger to the Android tablets either — it launched the Streak 7 tablet back in mid-2011, and I guess you could count the even older Streak 5 as the damage-prone precursor to today’s phablet craze. The market was younger and less crowded then, but Dell still wasn’t equipped for success. And Dell is far from the only PC maker trying to make a splash with a low-cost Android tablet either, since HP outed its cheap (and largely underwhelming Slate) tablet earlier this year. Throw in some forthcoming Tegra 4-powered devices built on NVIDIA’s Tegra Note design, new Kindle Fires from Amazon, and Google’s stalwart Nexus 7, and you’ve got a taste of just how crowded the tiny tablet market is.

I get that Dell is trying to lay a foundation here. If they’re lucky, this Venue business could cement the Dell brand as a tablet player that’s truly worth its salt. And looking past all that “blah” that the Venue 7 and 8 bring to the table, I get the sense that Dell is serious about making a name for itself in the tablet space this time. I’m looking forward to putting the review units through their paces on the off-chance Dell managed to to pump some extra oomph into these things — hopefully they decide to step outside the box for their inevitable followups.