Microsoft Releases Kinect For Windows

nk497 writes "Microsoft has released Kinect for Windows, featuring a new "near mode" that lets the gesture control tech be used as close as 40cm. The Kinect for Windows hardware will retail at $249 — well above the price of the version for Xbox 360 consoles. Microsoft defended the price difference, saying sales of games and Xbox Live subscriptions help subsidize the console version. The new version will support Windows 7 and the Windows 8 developer preview, as well as Windows Embedded 7 devices."

Re:Still fairly affordable

[Missing.Matter]

That's the main problem facing perception systems today. Humans have these two simple exteroceptive eyeballs and yet we can do incredible things. That's thanks to the amazing computational power of our brain, which we hardly understand. Thus, when we try to replicate our cognitive abilities we end up with algorithms that are completely intractable. I think this is in a large part due to computer scientists tendency to approach things with an engineering perspective instead of a biological perspective.

Re:Still fairly affordable

[tlhIngan]

That's the main problem facing perception systems today. Humans have these two simple exteroceptive eyeballs and yet we can do incredible things. That's thanks to the amazing computational power of our brain, which we hardly understand. Thus, when we try to replicate our cognitive abilities we end up with algorithms that are completely intractable. I think this is in a large part due to computer scientists tendency to approach things with an engineering perspective instead of a biological perspective.

Well, stuff like that isn't "wow".

The problem is well, we treat computers as automation. We let computers do stuff we find hard or boring. The stuff we find easy, it turns out, is very hard to do on computers - natural language processing (face it - a lot of people went "so what?" when they saw Watson last year), vision processing (object recognition, character/word recognition), and hearing.

It's stuff we don't think about - and it's boring to most people who can't comprehend how we can do stuff like read printed text, but the computer can't do a reliable job of it.

It's probably one of the ironies in life. We have computers doing stuff easily that we find hard, and stuff we do easily computers find hard.

One thing i never understood

[initialE]

Have you seen the design of a kinect? An up-down motor that runs once per power cycle and really only needs to be realigned when it is moved to a different position. Sensors 7cm apart that are housed in a 30cm frame of cheap tacky plastic, leading to a much bigger shipping box than necessary.. The kinect should be cheaper and smaller than it is now, what on earth is in all the empty space anyway?