How Kinect works?
Sorry for the Microsoft-heavy angle on my posts, but hey I’m in Redmond so that’s what I’m surrounded with!
The Kinect controller is proving to be quite popular, both in mainstream gaming but also in the hacky-designerly-sensorium domain. It’s a great bundle of sensors at a super affordable price. How does it exactly works? Well that is less obvious to properly understand the many facets that give Kinect all its power.
The XBoX’s Engineering Blog recently published a nice article detailing how the thing actually works. It’s worth the read and makes a good primer on the topic of machine learning. It goes to some details about the development of the whole system, failures they had along the way, and how they rely on prototyping with users to validate their ideas.
The well-established rules for HCI didn’t always apply when designing interactions for a living room with a 10-foot gesture experience, but that’s what made the process exciting! Through play testing we were able to better understand how users behaved, how much body movement was comfortable while gesturing for extended periods of time, and what natural gestures conflicted with the gesture sets we were exploring.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/EngineeringBlog/122910-HowYouBecometheController
Below is an older video explaining the Kinect.
