Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out 200
Just last week we learned that the Kinect had been hacked wide open and already we're seeing a flood of innovative stuff coming out. Jamie found a page with a lot of pictures and screenshots, and Engadget has more.
Re:Too Cool (Score:3, Informative)
And an IR emitter. And the software to make them work together.
The Kinect provides more than just a couple webcams.
Re:thx for helping us, Love M$ (Score:3, Informative)
only if you use the same code
once iOS 4.2 comes out it's going to have brightness control outside the settings app, similar to SBS Settings. Doubt apple will release the code since they made a lot of changes. all you have to do is take the code, change enough of it to make it look like your own and release it
Re:Too Cool (Score:3, Informative)
The hardware is quite a bit more than a glorified webcam. Check out this article for more information:
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/11/features/the-game-changer?page=all&p=2
Re:No. (Score:1, Informative)
One word: EyeToy.
No innovation. This is just MS taking existing technology and hyping it up beyond belief again, and the technology isn't even that impressive to begin with. It's laggy, imprecise and horrible for any real application, just like the EyeToy, the Wiimote, and Sony's wand-thing.
"Oh, you just hate new technology, if it were up to people like you we'd still be back in the stone age." NO. I'm 100% for new technology, but only if it was GOOD technology. Pushing garbage on us and calling it roses is just stupid. Fix your technology to be useful first, THEN hype it up and release it. It's taken new television technology forever to get to a point where it's acceptable to view without horrible blurring/motion tearing and horrible colors, and we've basically wasted our time and money on older ones.
Get it RIGHT first, THEN release.
Re:Targeted Ads (Score:3, Informative)
You're crosswatching too much. Crosswatching is not some psuedo-christian thing, its the TV watching equivalent of cross dressing.
They already target advertising extremely aggressively. We have DVRs so I only see flashes of commercials, but it seems my wifes soap operas don't advertise many video games and I don't see many feminine products advertised on the embarrassingly named syfy channel.
There are entire genres of TV shows I don't see ads for, don't know that exist (at least from my TV viewing), such as dancing with famous people, or musical high school children.
If you like... those kind of shows... hey, thats OK, but you can't demand they change their whole product lineup just for one guy on slashdot.
Re:thx for helping us, Love M$ (Score:4, Informative)
I'm still waiting for ...focus follows mouse...
A second of googling turned up this:
"Believe it or not, Windows does support focus-follows-mouse, though there is no GUI configuration exposing it. Instead you must edit a registry key and then log out and back in for the change to become effective. You can use regedit to edit the key. On Windows NT, set the following registry key to have a value of 1: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\Active Windows Tracking On NT it has some bugs: some apps auto-raise on focus, and alt-tab doesn't move the mouse. On Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, you need to change a binary-valued registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask This is a little-endian bitmask. For focus-follows-mouse, add the flag 0x1. For example, my XP SP2 laptop originally had a value of 9E 3E 05 80, which is 0x80053E9E. To activate focus-follows-mouse I changed to 0x80053E9F, or 9F 3E 05 80 in regedit. According to http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/18/ [winguides.com] you can also achieve raise-on-focus by adding the flag 0x40. I haven't tested that as I don't like raise-on-focus."
As for virtual desktops, I'm using a decent open-source third-party add-on called Z-Systems Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager...
Re:thx for helping us, Love M$ (Score:2, Informative)
Companies don't patent things because they're hard, they patent things so that they can control their use.
Which boils down to "they patent things so that they can generate revenue from them". Follow the money.
Re:Too Cool (Score:1, Informative)
assistive technologies, the constant theme for all those devices was insane price points.
I think the kinect could be another low cost assistive technology platform in it's infancy.
As someone who works in the medical technology field, I can tell you this isn't going to happen. Medical or assistive products won't be provided by state healthcare/medical insurance unless it's been FDA approved as such. The cost of getting a product past even the lowest level of FDA certification is enormous (especially when your "device" consists largely of uncertified tech produced by another company), and with a relatively niche customer market, it makes for an appreciable percentage of the end user price.
Re:Too Cool (Score:3, Informative)