If you look at the Smart TV landscape today

Microsoft’s Kinect platform didn’t just breath new life into the Xbox 360, it introduced a rapidly adopted way to interact with your television free of a controller. As we explore new ways that this same system can be used, a demonstration of how it could be implemented for use on Windows 8 offers a hint of what to expect from Kinect 2.0.

If you look at the Smart TV landscape today, you’ll see the effect Microsoft had with Kinect. Several companies are trying to implement an embedded voice and gesture solution into their living room experience right now. Samsung’s Smart TV line has an embedded camera that you can use to navigate, though it’s terribly crude when compared to Kinect. Google implemented voice search into their Google TV platform, which is great for the few people that still use it.

On a gaming platform, Kinect works well. In an environment like Windows 8, there’s a need for faster and more accurate methods of interaction than just holding your hand still in a specific place for a little while. It turns out that what Kinect really needed was to be able to pay closer attention to your hands.

Right now, your Kinect is about as aware of your hands as it is your kneecaps. when you open and close your fists, or wiggle your fingers around, the Kinect doesn’t pay attention to them at all. The three camera system deployed by the Kinect isn’t accurate enough to pick out your individual digits, so to your Xbox there’s just a densely packed mass at the end of your arm it can’t really do anything with.

The only thing the Kinect could detect with reasonable accuracy as you move around would be the difference between your hand when it was open versus when it was balled into a fist. By adding in this functionality, you gain something that feels much more like a click, which is needed for something like Windows 8.

Reade more >>

Microsoft’s Kinect $109.99 at Kmart continues to be the standard

Microsoft’s Kinect $109.99 at Kmart continues to be the standard for motion control that doesn’t require you hold a device, but back in May a serious competitor appeared. Leap Motion started showing off the Leap motion controller, which promised accuracy of 0.01mm. That means it’s more accurate than a mouse, and allows the movement of individual fingers to be detected. A low price point of just $69.99 also removes a major barrier to entry.

Now Leap Motion is shipping out dev kits for the USB-connected controller, and LabView hacker has just received theirs. The LabView team is already known for their interesting projects involving Wii Remotes, Kinect, Arduino, and Android phones, so we expected something a bit different from them using Leap, and they have delivered.

Just 24 hours after receiving the Leap dev kit they had it wirelessly hooked up to and controlling the movement of a quadcopter. By tilting and moving a hand over the Leap, the quadcopter adjusted itself to match, and the feedback was almost instant as well as being quite accurate.

The team said it was a simple task to get the quadcopter reacting by wrapping C# code into LabView and using the SDK to detect and communicate movement input. If they can do that in just a day, it bodes well for how quickly other developers are going to get to grips with the motion controller and start producing some interesting projects.

Reade more >>

Microsoft pretty much owns the market

Microsoft pretty much owns the market at the moment for motion controllers that don’t require you hold a device. The Kinect controller has sold in the millions, and continues to help Microsoft shift Xbox 360 consoles. But Kinect is about to get some serious competition.

Leap Motion has started showing off its Leap 3D motion controller. It sounds too good to be true until you watch the videos included here. It takes the form of a USB device a little bigger than a flash drive, costs $69.99, and claims to offer 200x the accuracy of anything else on the market. That equates to an accuracy of 0.01mm.

Plug the Leap 3D into your PC and it is accurate enough to detect even slight finger movements. That allows you to write in midair, perform very accurate pinch-zoom actions, and lets game developers use very specific hand gestures as input for their games.

Leap Motion claims that its technology offers a more accurate input method than a mouse or touchscreen, while at the same time opening up the possibility to take interaction beyond just movement and button clicks.

If you’re wondering why Kinect isn’t this accurate, apparently it has nothing to do with hardware advances and availability. Leap 3D exists due to a software breakthrough, and more specifically Leap Motion figuring out the math to allow for such accurate motion tracking. The underlying hardware is nothing special, hence the $70 price tag.

Reade more >>