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I would love nothing more if they would publish this and or open it up to community development.
Where is the second camera? To gleen 3 dimensional data from a single 2 dimensional image is hard, and requires intense algorithms. Two cameras makes it easier but still hard. I would love nothing more if they would publish this and or open it up to community development.
This is phenomenal, but devil is in the details in terms of sensitivity. They have to be using a really phenomenal camera and processor to get any real level of precision.
"The CPU, named Xenon at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM. The CPU emphasizes high floating point performance through multiple FPU and SIMD vector processing units in each core. It has a theoretical peak performance of 115.2 gigaflops and is capable of 9.6 billion dot products per second. Each core of the CPU is simultaneous multithreading capable and clocked at 3.2GHz. However, to reduce CPU die size, complexity, cost, and power demands, the processor uses in-order execution in contrast to the Intel Coppermine128-based Pentium III used in Xbox which used more advanced out-of-order execution.... A 21.6 GB/s front side bus, aggregated 10.8 GB/s upstream and downstream, connected Xenon with the graphics processor/northbridge. Xenon was equipped with a 1 MB Level 2 cache on-die running at half CPU clock speed. This cache is shared amongst the three CPU cores."
I don't think the processor will be the problem. The camera could be.
Microsoft has poured lots of money into basic research R&D over the years, which did not seem to pay off much in terms of popular products. Apple, Nintendo, Google, etc. seemed to come out with more innovative products, despite spending nowhere close to what Microsoft spends on R&D. This looks like a big exception to that. Johnny Lee, as a recently minted PhD, certainly knows the state of the art in this field, so if…
Apple won multi-touch, so Microsoft is going to push the conversation ahead to gesture-based ubiquitous computing devices. Once they get the cameras small enough they can just stick these things on Accelerando-style glasses or a wifi-enabled necklace akin to the sixth sense TED demo- that's when we have true ubiquitous computing.
Where is the second camera? To gleen 3 dimensional data from a single 2 dimensional image is hard, and requires intense algorithms. Two cameras makes it easier but still hard. I would love nothing more if they would publish this and or open it up to community development.
The nice thing about the Xbox 360 and PS3 for these kinds of input devices is that they're multicore, so the budgeting is pretty straightforward if they simply consume one core at all times.
I was cringing when they had the live avatar using the motion capture, though. It was gutsy and impressive, but seriously, guys, probabilistic kinematic constraints. People don't usually have their wrist twisted all the way around when they're standing in place, even if it's physically possible.
I'm very pleased with Microsoft's vision, though. I think it's a great step in the right direction for the industry. I do tend to wonder, though, if there is a fundamental difficulty in an input device that would seem to be inherently more fuzzy than the Wii controller.
Maybe I'm paranoid but isn't he basically saying that the demos don't reflect what's possible today in a shipping device i.e. the proverbial "vapourware". Other comments, here and elsewhere, reflect everyone loving this, yet when I watch the demos I think a) that's not actually possible, and far more importantly b) even if it was possible, it doesn't look like fun.
Notice how you can clearly see the on-screen body mapping to the person's body. Between that and the fact that I doubt they would make such a big announcement if it didn't already work fairly well, I'm now on the "this probably works" side.
Maybe I'm paranoid but isn't he basically saying that the demos don't reflect what's possible today in a shipping device i.e. the proverbial "vapourware". Other comments, here and elsewhere, reflect everyone loving this, yet when I watch the demos I think a) that's not actually possible, and far more importantly b) even if it was possible, it doesn't look like fun.
Well, I don't know that it really matters. If Microsoft knows what they're doing, the only way they're going to release this thing is either bundled with a game that's expected to be popular, or as a part of the next Xbox. Console perhipherals released in other ways have historically not been successful, no matter how good they are. Given this, I'd bank on them shipping the thing with the next Xbox. That should give…