Sep 30
If you weren’t convinced that the new Kinect was already amazing
     |
Sep 26
Xbox Fitness official, brings famous trainers, personalized feedback to living room workouts
Posted in: Today's Chili
Microsoft’s initial Kinect sensor might not have been awesome for first-person shooters, but it rocked for fitness games. Redmond is taking this one step further for its next-gen console with Xbox Fitness, a subscription-based service for the Xbox One. Xbox Fitness promises “instant, personalized feedback” on heart rate and form (thanks to the new Kinect’s innards), and celebrity trainers include Jillian Michaels and Tony Horton. It’s bringing P90X and Insanity workouts, too. The service will be free until December 2014 — with Xbox Live Gold, of course — but after that, Microsoft could be locking it behind two paywalls, according to a leaked test-page spotted by NeoGAF’s ever-vigilant community. We’ve reached out to the company for confirmation on pricing and will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime remember: Shut up, focus and do the work.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
Source: Xbox Wire
Sep 26
How Gesture Control Actually Works
Posted in: Today's Chili Gesture control sure is cool
| |
Sep 24
Kinect-based Computer Orchestra Uses Computers as Musicians: You Are the Conductor
Posted in: Today's ChiliNowadays it’s quite possible to create and play music live using a computer. You can also use MIDI controllers to make it easier for you to interact with music software and audio files. However, pushing keys and fiddling with knobs isn’t intuitive or fun to watch. Computer Orchestra manages to be both by letting you be a conductor of computers.
Computer Orchestra was made by three students from the art and design university ECAL. Simon de Diesbach, Jonas Lacôte and Laura Perrenoud designed it to be a crowdsourcing interface for uploading samples and then triggering them on different computers using simple hand gestures.
The idea is that you’ll upload samples to or download samples from a website, then you’ll assign those samples to your “musicians” – in this case, the members of the orchestra are all laptops. Using a Wi-Fi connection, a Kinect sensor, a programming language called Processing and the software library called SimpleOpenNI, you can then trigger those computers to play by waving your hands towards them. There also seems to be other gestures that vary the way the computers play the samples.
I know it’s very impractical, but it also seems like a lot of fun. Perhaps it’s possible to make a simpler version of this with a Leap controller and an array of color or light sensors. Using one laptop per sample seems like overkill, although it’s a sight to behold.
[via Designboom]
Sep 18
If you’ve wanted to immerse your body in a first-person shooter, you’ve typically had to use a complex simulator. Battlefield 4 may soon provide a decidedly simpler (and cheaper) alternative. DICE’s Patrick Bach has revealed to Xbox Wire that the game may use the Xbox One’s Kinect sensor for head-tracking look controls, such as leaning around a corner. Voice commands might also be available, Bach says. There’s no guarantees that BF4 will get the new input methods, but DICE may have competition as an incentive. Infinity Ward recently hinted to Official Xbox Magazine that Call of Duty: Ghosts could use Kinect for more than navigating menus, so there’s a chance that at least one of the two games will have motion control in the future.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, Microsoft
Via: Eurogamer
Source: Xbox Wire
Sep 17
Kinect for Windows developers can now get a little more creative: Microsoft has released version 1.8 of the camera’s SDK, which lets app creators produce a green screen effect by removing the background. The update also brings a new Kinect Fusion API that scans the color of an object in addition to its shape, saving some 3D modelers the trouble of creating a separate texture map. There’s better scene tracking and more code samples, too. Programmers who crave the new software tricks can grab the refreshed SDK and its companion tools at the source links.
Filed under: Peripherals, Software, Microsoft
Source: Kinect for Windows Blog, Download Center
Sep 11
For a coding contest where competitors had a limited amount of time to come up with a novel game that plays out in just 10 seconds, SassyBot Studio created this stressful-looking bomb defusing challenge that has players trying to figure out what wire to snip.
| |
Sep 04
By now world familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect camera system. Microsoft has recently hinted that Kinect camera technology is coming to the Windows Phone operating system. While the Kinect was first billed as a device to enable motion gaming on the Xbox 360, it became clear early on that the Kinect have a lot more […]
Sep 03
Out of the blue, Microsoft announced today it has bought Nokia’s core phone business for $7.17 billion. The announcement got everyone wondering what it means for future Nokia devices. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that they’ll continue to license Windows Phone to other OEMs, and that they’ll probably have shorter names for future devices. The company’s operations system group’s Vice President, Terry Myerson, hinted during a conference call today that the Xbox’s famed Kinect technology might be integrated into future Windows Phone devices.
Speaking with analysts and journalists, Myerson said that “In the area of imaging, the Nokia Lumia 1020 has no equal. We are excited to bring this together with our Kinect camera technology to delight our customers.” It is unclear right now when Microsoft intends on integrating this technology and exactly what it will be capable of doing on a mobile device since Myerson didn’t give any more details during the conference call. Previous rumors suggest that the technology might be used to enable users to control their devices through gestures and voice. It may also allow for deeper integration with Xbox consoles and offer a more immersive gaming experience on Windows Phone devices. If we’re going to see Kinect technology being integrated into the next round of Windows Phone devices, it is likely that we’ll get to hear more about this integration, both from official and unofficial sources.
Kinect Technology Might Be Integrated Into Windows Phone Devices original content from Ubergizmo. 
| |
Sep 02
According to Sony, the PlayStation 4 will feature a voice command system which will allow users to control the console by speaking to it—much like the Xbox One’s Kinect-powered system.
| |
Who's in charge here?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.