Kinect Hack Builds 3D Maps of the Real World 70
Lanxon writes "Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360 peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View. The Kinect's multi-camera layout can be used to capture some fuzzy, but astonishingly effortless 3D maps of real world locations and objects. As we saw in Oliver Kreylos' early hack, you can take the data from Kinect's depth-sensitive camera to map out a 3D point-cloud, with real distances. Then use the colour camera's image to see which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and eventually arrive at a coloured, textured model."
Actual blog post (Score:5, Informative)
Link to the actual blog post: http://blog.decoratorpattern.com/2011/01/23/real-world-mapping-with-the-kinect/ [decoratorpattern.com]
Re:Scary applications (Score:5, Informative)
an IR rangefinder would be much more useful at avoiding colissions on your path,
The Kinect is an "IR rangefinder", but a cheap mass-produced one. Unlike the more expensive laser scanned parallax or time-of-flight sensors, it uses a special diffraction grating to produce a "structured light field" for a 2D camera to measure localized parallax.
There are also cheaper pulsed IR time-of-flight depth sensors coming on the market for home use, these could have higher spatial resolution.
The cool thing is that these things don't cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Re:Videogame peripherals (Score:5, Informative)
The thing that I find cool about modern video gtame peripherals is that they seem more standardized than in the past (with the exception of the Sega Genesis/Atari 2600
controllers.)
Perhaps the connection is more standard, but I also see a fair amount of non standard shit going on, and not just in video game peripherals. The bundled Kinect doesn't come with the adapter so you can connect it to your PC (or older Xbox360). Don't fool yourself for one moment -- If MS could have ignored the existing XBox360 interface your Kinect they would have gladly made it more difficult to connect a Kinect to your PC.
Xbox360 headsets have nonstandard pin-outs, so you can't use other PC headsets on on XBox or vise versa. Garmin's GPS uses a proprietary USB cable (having a small resistor across two pins), and refuses to charge when connected to a PC or via standard USB plugged into a voltage inverter. Zune uses a standard AV connection (Camcorder 3.5mm), but they swap the audio & video jack pins so that you have to plug white to yellow & vise versa, (many assume only the more expensive Zune brand cable works). Even the power cable on a Apple G5 I serviced last week was non-standard (-_-) instead of ('.'). The iPhone/iPad Touch & Zune use encrypted protocols (keys changed on each firmware upgrade) so you can't use them without the crappy bundled media manager software.
They either use USB or Bluetooth, and to the 360's credit you can still use its proprietary wireless pad on a PC.
The 360's wireless is NOT bluetooth. You must use MS's proprietary wireless receiver. The controller will not work though a blutooth receiver (built-in or external). The play&charge USB cable is for charging only, and won't allow you to connect it to your PC.
Also, What's the use of a standard plug (USB), if the protocol or other proprietary quirks are introduced to make it incompatible (ala Zune, iPad Touch, Garmin resistor).
I have to disagree with you on the standardization trend; To me, it seems that more companies are figuring out how to proprieterroize the "standard" connections; less of my "standard" cables work with my devices.
PS: Just because the end that plugs into your PC is a standard USB connector, doesn't mean the end that plugs into your device isn't a proprietary shaped USB connector...