New kinect interview with Alex Kipman

GamesIndustry.biz has published a pretty detailed interview with alex kipman about kinect. gi does require you to register on their site though, but eurogamer brings the bacon with a summary for those that dont want to risk spam

check it out. real interesting stuff. for instance accordign to alex, kinect still detect 48 joints on the player and uses the gpu on the xbox to do so. it'll be really interesting to see what they do on windows will all that dx11 goodness

he also [re]confirms that kinect will use less resources on the xbox if you dont use all of its features, in otherwords the driver is somewhat modular. that is to be expected ofcource but still interesting..

Also notable is that he talks alittle bit about more hardcore games. kinect adventures for example might be a casual game but it does use the full unreal engine3 and we all know what that can do

there are some tidbits of his thoughts on lag in there as well

part 2 of the GI interview is up and finally they are talking more about hyrid experiences that use both the controller and kinect. apparently some of those are on the way

Picked up Kinect Sports and Dance Central today.

argh, curse the regional release date differences

After reading a lot of reviews i gotta say kinectimals seems like the biggest supprise.. its actually a game with substance! sports also seems more intriguing than i previously though, sonic riders as well..

love to hear your impressions

I was actually in the beta and had it for awhile.  It's very addictive.  I always have to play with the kinect menus for a bit everytime I turn the Xbox on.  Kinect sports is extra fun if you don't take it too seriously and mess around with the game and push the boundaries.  The games that feel the best are the ones that map your living room space to the game environment 1:1, table tennis and bowling for example.  Also, I'm really hoping Netflix gets Kinect-enabled soon, its the app I use the most.

BTW, you might be interested in this video: http://kotaku.com/5681314/see-kinects-thousands-of-points-of-invisible-light

yeah, saw that.. really awsome actually with that point resolution it would seem hand or perhaps even tracking is not completly off the wall, especially if you stand a little closer to the sensor.. apparently a new version of the kinect sdk uses the neck as a root node for the skeleton insted of the pelvis, hopefulls for applications like that, you could be closer to the sensor and get more pixels on torso/arms

you didnt try pluging it in to a pc to see what happens?

hopefully i'll be trying kinect out tomorrow on a gamefair here in stockholm (gamex)

@aL_:

Yeah, if you plug it in Windows starts searching for drivers for the "NUI Motor" then just gives up.

iFixIt did a teardown already: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/1

iFixIt did a teardown already: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/1

you beat me too it ive never thought about it before but according to the primesense diagram, their chip is manageing the sync between the rgb and the IR camera.. that actually pretty significant because syncing the two cameras on the computer xbox side could be really time consuming because of timing issues. bt if the primesense chip is triggering the cameras on the hardware level, that type of lag can be done away with. that it has autofocus is also interesting, that would mean it would work well in closer proximity of the player if you dont need the entire player in view, or if you sitting down

the biggest supprise though is the accelerometer.. presumably its in there to identify the floor plane, but  it also opens up for a bunch of interesting robotics applications. i'd never thing they'd out an accelerometer in there, much less a multi axis one.. having it might mean that the camera doesnt actually need to see the floor, you could just calibrate the height of the player with user input or a yardstick

hopefully someone hacks the kinnect soon so we can get a driver some folks will even pay 2000 bucks for that even just getting the base feed from the camera would be very useful to establish the baseline lag from the system

did you notice any difference in lag in that kinect setup screen where it shows you the feed?

From what I've read, there desperately needs to be some standardization. All games with controllers on XBox work the same way: you select/confirm with the A button, you cancel or go back with the B button. You can easily work any menu in any game because there's a standard that Microsoft dictated. With Kinect, they seem to have simply not bothered, which is annoying, because now you have to figure out and remember various arcane gestures and magic words like some wizened old warlock for every game you play.

Penny Arcade summed up the problem pretty well in their recent newspost.

They should mandate various standard gestures for pause, guide, continue, and back, at the very least. I suggest the spread eagle stance for the guide button, both because that makes your body an X and because it'd be hilarious.

Everything I've seen and read of it (from people who actually used it, not crazy forum people) makes me want to try it so badly, but I just can't justify buying it for ten minutes of marvelling at futuristic technology. I could justify buying it for a cool Kinect game, if only those existed.

@aL_:There's some cool night vision videos floating around now that answer the question of what kind of IR pattern is projected.

Apperently Miv

1 day ago, Cream​Filling512 wrote

@aL_:

Yeah, if you plug it in Windows starts searching for drivers for the "NUI Motor" then just gives up.

Microsoft is working very hard including with "law enforcement" to ensure you will not use Kinect hardware in any way unauthorized. In essence, you don't actually own it.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/176251/2000-Bounty-For-Open-Source-Xbox-Kinect-Drivers

I must say this is a dickheaded move.

@bass cant argue there.. "yeah lest do all we can to stop people from developing on our platform. that 'll boost adoption" idiots.

still, ms legal [hopefully] doesnt represent microsoft as a whole

@aL_: I can sort of get where they're coming from. They don't want adoption if that means adoption on platforms other than theirs. That makes sound business sense to me. They want the Kinect experience on platforms they control. That means XBox, and later on perhaps Windows. If they just let people develop drivers for it, soon you'll also be able to play kinect games on Linux and OSX, which is useless to Microsoft. Hence, they try to stop it.

It seems futile, because I imagine sooner or later somebody will have made drivers for it regardless. They should cut off the competition and bring out official Windows drivers or XNA support as soon as possible. A lot less people will be interested in dodgy third party support if they can get the real thing. Which would mean more people developing for Windows/Xbox instead of other platforms.

Personally though, I just want some drivers for it as soon as possible, official or other, because that'd mean we'll get to play with some actually interesting uses of this technology rather than the Wii++ games we're getting now.

It's possible the Kinect hardware is being subsidised by sales of Kinect-based games. In which case it's fairly obvious why they don't want drivers for other platforms turning up all over the place.

@bas @andyc valid points. however i still belive their should embrace peoples intrest and willingness to to develop on their platforms (winphone7 is another example of this, not letting you deploy your own apps outside their control) that is how killer apps are created. what if valve would have had the same policy? they we would'nt have counter strike. mods seemingly crazy apps are the heart of the pc strengh and innovations. microsoft stifiling that is just wrong. one of the people who use this hacked driver might create that killer app that can then be brought into games and push both hardware and retail games.

in any case, the attempts to prevent tampering doesnt seem to be very well done as gizmodo reports, someone has already gained acess to the motor and the accelerometer, seems like it is a 3axsis one after all

@aL_: Like I said, I can fully understand Microsoft's decision here from a business sense. Personally though, I can't wait to see what people come up with. Bring on the next Johnny Chung Lee, I say. 

Speaking of him, I wonder if Kinect is accurate enough to track the position of your head to display a 3D-ish image on a regular 2D screen. Johnny Chung Lee's Wiimote mod simply did that, after al, but with Kinect, you wouldn't need to be wearing something that emits infrared light on your head.