21–25 of 25 posts
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.
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.
I was watching the conference live, and I had the same reaction: "There's no way this actually works." Then they brought out a lady who did a live demo with it... I can't find that video right now, but it was very similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3vWzzoLHrM 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…
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.
Humans are capable of sensing depth with only one eye, this is due to the shape of our eye. Camera's work by receiving a 3D image on a 2D sensor. Our eyes work by receiving a 3D image on a 3D sensor. Our focal point is akin to a 2D sensor, but our peripheral vision wraps around a huge portion of our eye, which gives us the ability to triangulate.
While I doubt they'll have come up with a 3D sensor, I wanted to make it a point that depth perception with a single sensor is difficult for a computer presently. It would be entirely possible to design a more complicated camera, to compensate for the algorithms.
From the video, I'd guess they're either using two similar resolution cameras. Or they might be cheaping out. Using a 12MP camera would give you amazing picture resolution, however for 3D recognition, you could probably get away with amazing resolution for a project like this with something less than 1MP as the companion. This is essentially how one of our eyes work, we have incredible resolution in the focal point, but our peripheral vision is rather poor, but our brain superimposes the images scanned (quite literally our eye scans the environment using the focal point) and fakes everything.
I'm sure using a small, cheap companion sensor would provide 3D extremely well for movement recognition.
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.
I can't speak for the camera, but it should be remembered the XBox360 is no slouch when it comes to processing power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware#Central_proce... "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…
Who knows, they could have a secondary sensor that you place on the side of the TV, away from the main sensor module. Distance between sensors is usually the key to reduce processing requirements.
It's their project vision, so who knows what they'll have to do to get the job done.
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…
This isn't about the next generation of consoles, this is about the next generation of input technology. 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 ubiqu…