Hasta La Gadget!

Are you prepared to be blown away? Have your mind flipped inside-out? Experience a revelation to end all revelations? Tough luck, bubs. During an earnings call yesterday, GameStop president Tony Bartel was cited as saying that both Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s PlayStation Move would both be difficult to find this holiday season, noting that the Kinect would be “a hot item through the holiday season and the key opportunity will be just to continue to keep them in stock.” He also stated that the Move would be “in short supply,” and even went so far as to predict that consumers would be “following the UPS truck to our stores to pick up that product as soon as they can find it.” Naturally, GameStop’s in-stock guarantee won’t apply to the two things it actually should (read: Kinect and Move), and Tony stopped short of providing hard evidence that this so-called shortage would in fact occur. But hey, no one ever said that drumming up demand for a product your store hawks was a bad business move, you know? And on the real, we’re guessing that Santa will actually have the hots for these things, and if you’re considering one, it’s always wise to be proactive. Or spend countless nights attempting to snipe Johnny Doe on eBay — your call.

[Image courtesy of Geek In Heels]

Shocker! GameStop expects Kinect and Move to be in short supply this holiday season originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Nov 2010 01:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CNET  |  Seeking Alpha  | Email this | Comments

Philipp Robbel, a student at MIT’s Personal Robotics Group, has used a hacked Xbox Kinect camera and an iRobot Create kit to make a Roomba-esque KinectBot that can recognize human beings and respond to their gestural commands.

In an interview with SingularityHub, Robbel discussed how KinectBot grew out of his research in robots that could locate trapped or missing people in a disaster. The Kinect’s ability to map terrain in 3-D and to recognize and respond to human gestures could eventually be teamed up with aerial drones and rapid-response teams to launch rescue operations.

This video shows how KinectBot was assembled and what it can do.

Bear in mind, this is just what Robbel calls a “weekend hacking project.” Imagine what Microsoft’s Robotics team — who’ve had a lot longer to play with the tech behind Kinect than the rest of us — might be cooking up in their labs.

Still a $150 off-the-shelf sensor like Kinect opens up the option box for everybody. Add the right mix of boops and beeps, a computer-hacking interface, jet packs and the ability to serve drinks and fix starships, and we’re just a few iterations away from a full-fledged R2-D2 unit. We’re living in the future.

See Also:

• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
• How Facial Recognition Works in Xbox Kinect
• Alt Text: The Secret Diary of Sentient Kinect
• Kinect Hacks Already Yielding Impressive Results
• Another Kinect hack that's vastly more interesting than the games …
• How Wii and Kinect Hack Into Your Emotions
• Adafruit Offers $1000 Bounty for Open-Source Kinect Drivers …
• Kinect Running on Multiple Platforms, Looking Cool

We’re sorry if you’re like, so over Kinect hacks, but with a million tinkerers just getting warmed up on the thing, we recommend you just get comfortable and try to enjoy it. A new processing app by Chris Rojas takes the distance data and renders objects in neon cubes, with the size of the cube based on the object’s distance from the sensor. Sure, it won’t cure world hunger, but it looks pretty sweet. Of course, that wasn’t good enough, so Chris hooked his app up to TouchOSC on the iPad, which gives him sliders to define and adjust different “planes of interest,” along with the accelerometer input of the iPad to control zoom and pan of the virtual camera. Just don’t get too close to that sensor, Chris, or the MCP might decide to digitize you entirely! Check out the original, iPad-less Box Cloud video after the break.

Continue reading Kinect data massaged into retro-futuristic ‘Box Cloud,’ iPad tilts its way into the action

Kinect data massaged into retro-futuristic ‘Box Cloud,’ iPad tilts its way into the action originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Adafruit Industries Blog  |  cruxphotography (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

As soon as a novel piece of tech makes it to the masses, it never takes long until hackers start appropriating it for all manner of unintended uses. And that’s exactly what’s starting to happen now with Xbox’s recently-released controller-free gaming system, Kinect.

One such techno-tinkerer is Oliver Kreylos who has developed a method to create 3D rendering based on video collected from the Kinect–in real-time.

This technique allows users to create a fairly impressive 3D rendering of themselves and the surrounding environment (with the one exception that the single vantage point of the Kinect creates some holes or “shadows” in the rendering). The rendered environment can be explored as any digital 3D space, allowing viewers to virtually walk through any area within the Kinect’s view.

The tech works off of C++ code which Oliver has made available on his site under a General Public Use license. This cheap and accessible tech could have various applications down the road–everything from communications to security/surveillance to new forms of social gaming.

Be sure to watch the whole video after the jump to get a full appreciation of the possibilities.

via Hack a Day 

Microsoft’s Dennis Durkin voiced an interesting idea at an investment summit last week — the idea that the company’s Kinect camera might pass data to advertisers about the way you look, play and speak. “We can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are,” he told investors, suggesting that the Kinect offered business opportunities that weren’t possible “in a controller-based world.”

And over time that will help us be more targeted about what content choices we present, what advertising we present, how we get better feedback. And data about how many people are in a room when an advertisement is shown, how many people are in a room when a game is being played, how are those people engaged with the game? How are they engaged with a sporting event? Are they standing up? Are they excited? Are they wearing Seahawks jerseys?

Needless to say, sharing this level of photographic detail with advertisers presents some major privacy concerns — though it’s nothing we haven’t heard before — but moreover it’s explicitly against the privacy policy Microsoft presents Kinect users. “Third party partners use aggregated data to deliver Kinect experiences (games or applications), to understand how customers use their Kinect experiences, and to improve performance or even to help plan new experiences,” the Kinect Privacy and Online Safety FAQ reads, but also “They are not permitted to use the information for marketing purposes such as selling you games or services, or for personalizing advertising” (bolding ours).

In an email to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft flatly denied that the Kinect would do anything of the sort, whether via third-party partners or otherwise. “Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE do not use any information captured by Kinect for advertising targeting purposes,” representatives wrote. Honestly, some of us at Engadget still think targeted advertising is kind of neat, but we know how seriously you take this stuff.

Microsoft exec caught in privacy snafu, says Kinect might tailor ads to you originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Digital Trends  |  Wall Street Journal, BMO Transcript (docx)  | Email this | Comments