Hasta La Gadget!

Corporate vice president and director of Windows Phone Program Management, Joe Belfiore, holds his prototype Samsung device running Windows Phone 7 on campus at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com

Microsoft staff refer to December 2008 as “The Reset” — the month that the company killed all progress on its Windows phone project and started over.

It’s a measure of how deep a hole Microsoft had dug itself into that the employees interviewed by Wired.com were unanimous in calling this a good thing. Even though the software titan had a head start on phone software beginning with Windows CE back in 1996, the subsequent Windows Mobile OS suffered from steep declines in market share when pitted against more user-friendly phones, like the iPhone and the Android-powered Droid.

“It was trying to put too much functionality in front of the user at one time,” said Bill Flora, a design director at Microsoft, reflecting on Windows Mobile’s mistakes. “It resulted in an experience that was a little cluttered and overwhelming for a lot of people today. It felt ‘computery.’”

An un-sexy OS didn’t bode well for Microsoft. The outdated design of Windows Mobile contributed to a stereotype that Microsoft cared little about customers and was focused only on big sales to big companies. It symbolized a software leader losing its edge.

Furthermore, Windows Mobile’s shrinkage in the market was embarrassing for a company whose CEO Steve Ballmer previously laughed at Apple’s iPhone for its lack of a keyboard and high price tag, only to admit three years later that Microsoft had fallen far behind.

“We were ahead of this game and now we find ourselves No. 5 in the market,” Ballmer said at an All Things Digital Conference. “We missed a whole cycle.”

Recognizing it needed to play serious catchup, Microsoft essentially hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Mobile, rebooting its mobile OS like a balky, old Windows PC and making a fresh start.

The company spent six weeks hatching a plan for a Windows phone do-over, and it set a deadline of one year to build and ship a brand new OS.

The end result was Windows Phone 7, an operating system with a tiled-based user interface that looks nothing like its predecessor. The first Windows Phone 7 handsets will hit stores today in the United States.

The reset was no simple task: It involved bringing in new managers, reorganizing the Windows phone-design department and opening new test facilities dedicated to mobile hardware.

Here’s how the company did it.

Corporate vice president and director of Windows Phone Program Management, Joe Belfiore, listens to Don Coyner, General Manager of US Shared Studios as he discusses Windows Phone 7. Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com

Yes, Microsoft’s Kinect has already been cracked, as you’ll see on video after the break — the motion-sensing depth camera now nods its head on command and displays real-time accelerometer data on one lucky hacker’s PC. We tracked down the son-of-a-gun who did it — as it happens, the same NUI Group member who hacked the PlayStation Eye in 2008 — and found to our disappointment that he doesn’t necessarily intend to unleash his new exploit on the world. The $2,000 prize Adafruit is presently offering for open-source Kinect drivers isn’t his aim, though he does have big personal plans for the device, as he hopes to integrate it into his company’s commercial visualization suite CL Studio Live. It seems that work is progressing fast, as he’s already gotten video streams from both cameras to output to his computer, and he plans to upload a far more convincing video soon. Here’s hoping he has a change of heart about sharing his rapid accomplishments.

Update: Second video after the break!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Kinect does hacker’s bidding, but not for fortune or fame (update: more video)

Kinect does hacker’s bidding, but not for fortune or fame (update: more video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s a major corporation to do when it’s trying to bring its stake in the smartphone world back from the dead? Why, call in the help of some vampires, naturally. Character Jeremy Gilbert from CW’s Vampire Diaries looks like he’ll be tapping away on an LG Quantum in the next episode, calling up Bing Maps and then getting an aerial view of some mysterious compound. Vampire hideout? Werewolf den? Factory where they make really great hair product? You’ll have to tune in to find out.

Screen Grabs: Jeremy on Vampire Diaries uses LG Quantum to find the undead, look dreamy originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Nov 2010 20:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

See Also:

• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
• Xbox 360 Dashboard Redesign Brings Kinect, ESPN Support
• Gadget Lab Podcast: Xbox Kinect, Wired's Fall Test, Skyfire …
• Hands On: Xbox Kinect Games Give You a Serious Workout
• What Every Parent Needs To Know About The XBox Kinect
• Review: Flawed Kinect Offers Tantalizing Glimpse at Gaming's …
• Microsoft Prices Kinect at $150, or $300 With New 4-GB Xbox 360 …

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.

See Also:

• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
• 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Microsoft’s Kinect
• Review: Flawed Kinect Offers Tantalizing Glimpse at Gaming's Future
• From E3: Microsoft Gives us a Reason to Kinect
• Engineers Test Highly Accurate Face Recognition