Adafruit’s $2,000 bounty for an open source Kinect driver hack was only offered up late last week and already someone has allegedly delivered, said Adafruit’s Phillip Torrone in an email to us just now. This was inevitable. More »
Microsoft’s $150 Xbox add-on, the Kinect, can use face-recognition technology to log you onto your Xbox Live account. But it’s not trouble-free.
To understand why, you need to know how it works.
Kinect effectively has two cameras: a traditional color video camera, which takes pictures and enables conference chat, and an infrared light sensor that measures depth, position and motion. One needs light, the other doesn’t. Facial recognition uses both.
Yesterday, Gamespot shook up the tech blogosphere a bit with its account of two dark-skinned employees not being automatically recognized to log in to their Xbox accounts. Consumer Reports repeated the experiment and blamed low light for recognition problems.
“Kinect works great with people of all skin tones,” Microsoft said by e-mail. “And just like a camera, optimal lighting is best. Anyone experiencing issues with facial recognition should adjust their lighting settings, as instructed in the Kinect Tuner.”
Boys and Girls Club members get a free Kinect. Image: Microsoft
When I first heard the Gamespot story, I was confused. I knew that the facial-recognition problems Hewlett-Packard ran into late last year, with webcam software bundled with its laptops, were attributed to low light. But Kinect’s recognition technology didn’t need light, I thought, because it worked using infrared.
That’s one of the selling points of the technology, frankly: When watching a movie or playing a game, people don’t necessarily want the room at full brightness. And indeed, Kinect can recognize movement for game playing and navigation in any lighting conditions, regardless of shadows and skin tones.
But it turns out that the facial-recognition software does use the color camera, according to this Microsoft factsheet (.docx). According to Microsoft, “Kinect has a video camera that delivers the three basic color components. As part of the Kinect sensor, the RGB camera helps enable facial recognition and more.”
And unlike the infrared sensor, the RGB camera depends on visible light. If you turn the lights down low, it will have more trouble identifying you.
The depth sensor does makes facial recognition more accurate, because it can determine the three-dimensional shape of your face. As I wrote yesterday, “When you step in front of it, the camera ‘knows’ who you are. Does it ‘know’ you in the sense of embodied neurons firing, or the way your mother knows your personality or your confessor knows your soul? Of course not. It’s a videogame.”
Faces of Bush and Bin Laden are drawn on the 3-D facial surface of the same person. Credit: Michael Bronstein.
Neither two-dimensional or three-dimensional facial-recognition technology alone is perfect. Computer scientist and facial-recognition expert Michael Bronstein writes:
While traditional two-dimensional face recognition methods suffer from sensitivity to external factors, such as illumination, head pose, and are also sensitive to the use of cosmetics, 3D methods appear to be more robust to these factors. Yet, the problem of facial expressions is a major issue in 3D face recognition, since the geometry of the face significantly changes as the result of facial expressions.
So when you’re logging into Xbox Live, turn the lights up bright. Once you’re logged in, adjust lighting level to taste.
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Racist gadgets? It’s certainly not the first time we’ve
heard this before. A while back, there was some talk of racist HP Webcams–meaning that the devices
had difficulty recognizing users with different (read: darker) skin tones.
The complaint is more or less the same, this time around.
Shortly after first Xbox 360 Kinect reviews first started rolling, we started
hearing reports that the peripheral’s camera was having some difficulty recognizing
players with darker skin.
GameSpot had something to say about the matter, “In testing
the Kinect, two dark-skinned GameSpot employees had problems getting the
system’s facial recognition features to work.”
Consumer Reports, on the other hand, has taken these
statements to heart, attempting to debunk them, much as it did with the HP
reports. “The log-in problem is related to low-level lighting and not directly
to players’ skin color,” writes the site. “Like the HP webcam, the Kinect camera needs enough
light and contrast to determine features in a person’s face before it can
perform software recognition and log someone into the game console
automatically.”
So there you have it–one less racist video game peripheral to worry
about!
As sure as night follows day, and a greasy, carbohydrate-laden breakfast follows a drunken night out, so iFixit has followed the launch of Microsoft’s new Kinect by tearing one apart and photographing the metal and plastic cadaver.
The Kinect, which went on sale yesterday, is a controller-free controller for the Xbox 360. It sits atop your TV and beams infra-red into the room with its projector, and then uses cameras to track where you, your face and your limbs are, allowing you to control the on-screen action.
So, what’s inside? First, the whole sensor-bar sits on a motorized base so it can follow you around (creepy). This contains some crappy plastic gears which will doubtless wear down soon enough. On the other hand, if you have a games-room big enough that the Kinect actually needs to swivel, you can probably afford regular replacements.
The circuit-board is split into three parts, stacked up to it in the log, narrow Kinect, and the the cameras peek from one side. There are two cameras, both big webcam-style autofocus models: the infrared one has a resolution of 320 x240 and the RGB camera has 640 x 480 pixels.
There are also four microphones, pointing in various directions. The Kinect calibrates to the room you are in, taking into account the way the sound bounces off walls and furniture in order to properly recognize your voice commands.
There is one oddity inside the Kinect: a fan, in a machine that consumes a mere 12 Watts. IFixit speculates that Microsoft was burned (literally?) by the dreaded and infamous Red Ring of Death on the Xbox, and is now being over-cautious. Either that or it just likes adding noise to your living room to annoy you, kind of like a physical incarnation of the hated Clippy.
Microsoft Kinect Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]
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If you ever doubted that Microsoft’s Kinect was based on PrimeSense technology, you can leave those suspicions at the door — iFixit‘s separated the twin-eye motion sensing camera into its constituent parts, and there’s definitely PrimeSense silicon on board. To be precise, there’s a PrimeSense processor that handles images from the color and infrared CMOS auto-focus imagers, a Marvell SoC to interface with those cameras,64MB of DDR2 memory and 1MB of flash plus an accelerometer of all things. (Perhaps game developers intend to break the fourth wall when you inevitably knock the unit off your TV.) Filled with four different kinds of security screws and a fair bit of glue, Kinect’s a tough nut to crack. Seems like a small price to pay, however, when it’s so wonderfully robotic underneath. Oh, and speaking of the Kinect — don’t suppose you’ve read our full review?
Microsoft Kinect ripped to pieces, found to contain chips on tiny green boards originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Does Microsoft’s new face- and motion-sensing peripheral for the Xbox 360, the Kinect, have problems recognizing dark-skinned faces?
Testers at GameSpot say that it does. Specifically, they wrote, “two dark-skinned GameSpot employees experienced problems with the system’s facial recognition abilities.” GameSpot noted that this affected facial recognition only, and that the system was still able to recognize body movements (its “skeletal tracking system,” which is based on infrared light) so people of any skin tone could play all the games just fine.
The issue echoes a problem that HP ran into last year, when a video popped up claiming, with tongue slightly in cheek, that the face-recognition feature in HP laptops was racist because it was able to track a white person’s face, while seeming to ignore that of the dark-skinned person next to her.
However, Consumer Reports investigated the problem with its own tests and found no problems with face recognition or skeletal tracking, with one important exception: The Kinect was unable to do face recognition accurately in the dark, regardless of how light or dark the subject’s skin was.
That’s because the Kinect uses visible light for its face recognition, and is therefore more sensitive to darkness.
It also has trouble with sunlight, as Wired reviewer Chris Kohler found. In other words, Kinect may not be racist, but it might be a vampire.
Have you seen any issues with face recognition software, either in the Kinect or in other products? Speak out in the comments!
Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
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In this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, Wired.com’s Danny Dumas joins the show to gush about the Xbox Kinect, a brand new accessory that basically turns your body into a game controller. It uses cameras and microphones to detect your skeletal structure. That’s nuts.
We also highlight Wired.com’s Fall Test, our selection of 39 best products of 2010. Danny’s personal favorite is Netflix, a movie-streaming service that keeps getting bigger and better.
I wrap up the podcast with an iPhone app I’m not a big fan of: Skyfire, which promises to play Flash videos by automatically transcoding them into iOS-compatible HTML5 video. Problem is, it doesn’t work very well, and it’s not too useful.
—
Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds
Or listen to the audio here:
Gadget Lab audio podcast #94
http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0094.mp3
Open-source hardware company Adafruit has declared open season on Microsoft’s Kinect, offering a $1000 bounty to anyone who can write and release open-source drivers for the camera.
Kinect, released today for Xbox 360, is expensive for a video game peripheral, but inexpensive considering its built-in hardware. It has an RGB camera, depth sensor, and multi-array microphone. But as we observed yesterday, it’s Kinect’s proprietary software that provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition capabilities.
“Imagine being able to use this off the shelf camera for Xbox for Mac, Linux, Win, embedded systems, robotics, etc.” Adafruit writes. “We know Microsoft isn’t developing this device for FIRST Robotics, but we could! Let’s reverse engineer this together, get the RGB and distance out of it and make cool stuff!”
The OK Project is Adafruit’s first attempt at a contest of this kind. Any person or group to upload working Kinect code and examples under an open source license to GitHub will be awarded $1000. The code can run on any operating system but must be open-source. Adafruit even invites Microsoft to participate.
This isn’t much like finding an open driver for a printer. It’s more like jailbreaking the iPhone. The Kinect has its own processor, and the code powering it operates several different pieces of hardware and does a lot of preprocessing before sending it out to the console. The human-anatomy and facial-recognition software is especially tricky. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
In an email, Adafruit’s Phillip Torrone writes that the company “would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox.” That does sound like Microsoft’s bag, and I’d bet many people in the company in those fields have plans for the tech behind Kinect. Sadly, I doubt they’ll be tripping over themselves to help hack the company’s own camera.
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And just like that, all three of the major game consoles now have some semblance of motion controls. Unlike the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation Move, however, Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 opts to get rid of buttons altogether, relying on body gestures and voice commands. As the (estimated to be $500 million) ad campaign says, “you are the controller” — for better and for worse. Read on for our full review!
Gallery: Kinect for Xbox 360 review
Continue reading Kinect for Xbox 360 review
Kinect for Xbox 360 review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft’s motion gaming peripheral is, if executed correctly, quite possibly the future of gaming. It might even be the future of WIndows 8 and computers everywhere. But how much fun is playing with Kinect right now? More »
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