Apple’s purchase of PrimeSense last week had all the tech industries howling. The Israel-based company’s motion tracking technology had largely informed early versions of Kinect, Microsoft’s motion-tracking and voice command interface for the Xbox 360 gaming console. Was Apple planning to use PrimeSense’s expertise in motion tracking to propel its gadgets into a new era […]
Apple today confirmed its widely rumored purchase of PrimeSense, the start-up company that made it possible for Microsoft to develop the motion-tracking technology behind the Kinect device for the blockbuster Xbox line of gaming consoles. The deal was reported by Calcalist to have been completed last week, but neither Apple nor PrimeSense would comment. Today’s […]
Apple has reportedly acquired PrimeSense, the motion-tracking company responsible for the technology in the original Xbox 360 Kinect, in a deal said to be worth around $345m. Whispers of the possible purchase, today reported by Israeli news site Calcalist, began back in July though were described as being in the early stages, and PrimeSense unofficially […]
We’re ramping up at an unprecedented rate this year towards total quantification of movement – especially sports and exercise-related movement – with devices like the Zepp Sensor. This device works inside a whole Zepp training system which aims to connect your movements – all of them – to mobile apps. You’ll find the teams at […]
A new company called VRcade aims to revive the idea of a gaming arcade with the help of virtual reality. Whereas VR headsets like the Oculus Rift need to be wired to a computer to work, VRcade’s headset has a wireless transmitter. Why? Because VRcade isn’t just a headset, it’s an entire room. Or even an entire floor. When you move in the real world, you move in VRcade’s virtual world.
Aside from its wireless headset, VRcade uses motion capture cameras and a modular motion capture suit. In addition to the suit, there are also markers on the headset and whatever prop you have – like the gun in the image above – that the cameras can use to track your movement. In other words, while other VR headsets can track only your head, VRcade tracks you.
VRcade has several advantages over what VRcade CEO and co-founder Jamie Kelly calls “virtual sit down gaming.” VRcade’s games will encourage player movement: walk, run, sneak or jump in the real world and you do the exact same thing in the virtual world. As far as controls go, it doesn’t get more intuitive than that. For instance, VRcade claims that the tester in the video below has no experience with first person shooters, but she still figures out how to navigate in the virtual world:
The correspondence between movement and virtual output also reduces the risk of motion sickness, unlike when you’re experiencing VR while confined to one spot. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is that extra layer of immersion that users will get from being able to physically feel their movement. Here’s Kelly explaining the basics of VRcade:
VRcade seems really promising: the second coming of the arcade shop, but more inclusive and possibly even healthier. In addition, VRcade can also adapt their system for non-gaming purposes, such as giving virtual tours of structures that have yet to be built.
But of course nothing is perfect. As Ars Technica notes, VRcade has a chicken-or-egg situation when it comes to attracting game developers. Obviously the company needs developers to make games for its system, but because a VRcade game has to be tailored to a particular space, they need to already have that space rented or bought. But how will they know the dimensions of the space a game needs if the game doesn’t exist yet? Hopefully VRcade can figure that out.
[VRcade via Ars Technica]
Apps and devices that track motion are of questionable use value – it’s true that they provide a general idea of a user’s activity level, but that can very wildly from reality, since there’s often very little involved in the motion tracking algorithms involved beyond detecting motion and counting that as a step. It’s not often the fault of these devices: as humans, we’re very inconsistent and unreliable in terms of where we keep these things.
Sometimes, your phone’s in your pocket. Sometime it’s in a bag. Sometimes it’s in a holster, if you miss your BlackBerry very much. But the point is, it’s not always in the same place, and where it’s stored can make a huge difference in terms of how accurately it gathers and reports information about the motion and activity of its owner.
A team at Northwestern University wanted to make activity tracking more accurate, without forcing humans to be more consistent in how they use and carry their devices. The result is an algorithm that not only compensates for when a device is carried in a sub-optimal location on a person’s body or in their bags, coats and purses, but one that actually predicts and detects when it’s being carried in different ways so that it can adapt to each new transport scenario without input from the user.
The study describing the NWU team’s work doesn’t deny that there are ways to carry a smartphone that detect motion more accurately than others – that’s still the case. But using the algorithm they’ve developed, people will at least be more likely to get an accurate picture of their daily activity regardless of where they store their phone. And the goal of the team isn’t just to make sure the next generation of NIke+ Move and ARGUS apps are better at telling you you’re lazy; the NWU researchers want to make apps useful in diagnosing and understanding critical diseases with motion-related symptoms, including Parkinson’s.
Study lead investigator Konrad Kording says that he believes smartphones will have crucial roles in personal health in the very near future, and part of preparing for that future involves making sure they not only have the sensors, but also the smarts to make sense of any data they’re gathering.
Kids love to play fight. Just give them a few seconds of idle time and their minds will transform them into all sorts of characters. Soon enough you’ll hear them making sound effects for their movements and weapons. But the problem with being their own foley artist is that they can’t pew pew pew and spew killer lines at the same time. The Mega Stomp Battle can help with that.
The Mega Stomp Battle is composed of a small box and a wand that emit sound effects when you walk, wave the wand or push the wand’s trigger. It has 10 sound banks or character types, such as a knight, a giant monster or a pirate. Each sound bank has at least six sounds for different types of movements like walking, attacking and more.
Someone on YouTube said we should watch the video on mute. I disagree. The guys in the video look stupid even with the sound on. But you might not care about how you look once you’ve tried living a life with sound effects. You can order Mega Stomp Battle from ThinkGeek for $40 (USD).
Motion-tracking technology that allows you to control your smartphone from several feet away, even when it’s away on a nearby table, could show up in handsets as soon as next year. Elliptic Labs gesture control system uses tiny ultrasonic sensors to grant 180-degree awareness to phones and tablets, picking up hand movement from up to […]
Google has acquired Flutter, the gesture-recognition specialist dubbed “Kinect for OS X”, with development of the hand tracking system headed in-house at the search giant. Flutter, which offers a Mac app that turns the webcam into a remote control system for navigating media players like iTunes, Spotify, and VLC, has cooked up its own machine-vision […]
Apple has a new trick up its sleeve with the iPhone 5s that was talked about on stage during its recent reveal event, but the impact of which won’t be felt until much later when it gets fully taken advantage of by third-party developers. Specifically, I’m talking about the M7 motion coprocessor that now takes the load of tracking motion and distance covered, requiring much less battery draw and enabling some neat new tricks with tremendous felt impact.
The M7 is already a boon to the iPhone 5s without any third-party app support – it makes the iPhone more intelligent in terms of when to activate certain features and when to slow things down and conserve battery life by checking less frequently for open networks, for instance. Because it’s already more efficient than using the main A-series processor for these tasks, and because changing these behaviours can themselves also save battery, the M7 already stretches the built-in battery to its upper limits, meaning you’ll get more talk time than you would otherwise out of a device that’s packing one.
Besides offering ways for Apple to make power management and efficiency more intelligent on the new iPhone 5s, the M7 is also available for third-party developers to take advantage of, too. This means big, immediately apparent benefits for the health and activity tracker market, since apps like Move or the Nike+ software demoed during the presentation will be able to more efficiently capture data from the iPhone’s sensors.
The M7 means that everyone will be able to carry a sensor similar to a Fitbit or equivalent in their pocket without having to cart around a separate device, which doesn’t require syncing via Bluetooth or worrying about losing something that’s generally tiny, plus there’s no additional wristwear required. And the M7′s CoreMotion API is open to all developers, so it’s essentially like carrying around a very powerful motion tracking gizmo in your pocket which is limited in function only by what developers can dream up for it.
So in the future, we’ll likely see gesture-controlled games (imagine the iPhone acting as a gesture controller for a title broadcast to Apple TV via AirPlay), as well as all kinds of fitness trackers and apps that can use CoreMotion to limit battery drain or change functionality entirely depending on where and when they’re being used, as detected by motion cues. An app might offer very different modes while in transit, for instance, vs. when it’s stationary in the home.
Apple’s iPhone 5s is an interesting upgrade in that much of what’s changed takes the form of truly innovative engineering advances, with tech like the fingerprint sensor, camera and M7 that are each, in and of themselves, impressive feats of technical acumen. That means, especially in the case of the M7, the general consumer might not even realize how much of a generational shift this is until they get their hands on one, and new software experiences released over the hardware’s lifetime will gradually reveal even more about what’s changed.
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