PRESENTATION ON:

KINECT A.K.A PROJECT NATAL

• Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands.

• Kinect (codenamed in development as Project Natal) is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console and Windows PCs.

BRIEF HISTORY OF KINECT

• Kinect was launched in North America on November 4, 2010, in Europe on November 10, 2010, in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore on November 18, 2010, and in Japan on November 20, 2010. 

• The Kinect claimed the Guinness World Record of being the "fastest selling consumer electronics device" after selling a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days. 24 million units of the Kinect sensor had been shipped as of January 2012.

• Microsoft released Kinect software development kit for Windows 7 on June 16, 2011. This SDK was meant to allow developers to write Kinecting apps in C++/CLI, C#, or Visual Basic .NET.

THE TECHNOLOGY

THE WORKING

The Kinect uses structured light and machine learning –

Inferring body position is a two-stage process: first compute a depth map (using structured light), then infer body position (using machine learning).

The results are great!

The system uses many college-level math concepts, and demonstrates the remarkable advances in computer vision in the last 20 years.

Structured light general principle: project a known pattern onto the scene and infer depth from the deformation of that pattern

The Kinect uses infrared laser light, with a speckle pattern

The depth map is constructed by analyzing a speckle pattern of infrared laser light.

The Kinect uses an infrared projector and sensor; it does not use its RGB camera for depth computation.

The technique of analyzing a known pattern is called structured light. The Kinect combines structured light with two classic computer vision techniques:

depth from focus, and depth from stereo.

STAGE 1

DEPTH FROM FOCUS

The Kinect dramatically improves the accuracy of traditional depth from focus

The Kinect uses a special (“astigmatic”) lens with different focal length in x- and y- directions

A projected circle then becomes an ellipse whose orientation depends on depth

Depth from focus uses the principle that stuff that is more blurry is further away

DEPTH FROM STEREO

Depth from stereo uses parallax.

If you look at the scene from another angle, stuff that is close gets shifted to the side more than stuff that is far away.

The Kinect analyzes the shift of the speckle pattern by projecting from one location and observing from another.

STAGE 2INFERRING BODY POSTION

Body parts are inferred using a randomized decision forest, learned from over 1 million training examples

Stage 2 starts with 100,000 depth images with known skeletons (from a motion capture system)

COMBINIG

STAGES ONE AND TWO. WE

GET STAGGER

ING RESULTS.

THE WORKING

THE MIDDLEWARE

At this point, both the Kinect’s hardware — its camera and IR-light projector — and its firmware (sometimes called “middleware”) are operating.

The Kinect has an on-board processor which is using algorithms to process the data to render the three-dimensional image.

The middleware also can recognize people: distinguishing human body parts, joints and movements, as well as distinguishing individual human faces from one another. When you step in front of it, the camera “knows” who you are.

A SCENE FROM HARRY POTTER GAME ON KINECT

THE POWER OF KINECT

THE BEST PART OF KINECT

UNLIKE THE SONY PLAYSTATION MOVE OR THE NINTENDO WII, KINECT IS COMPLETELY CONTROLLER FREE!!!

CONCLUSION

Kinect is something different.

It’s communal, continuous and general: a Natural User Interface (or NUI) for multimedia, rather than a GUI for gaming.

But it takes a lot of tech to make an interface like that come together seamlessly and “naturally.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY How Microsoft Kinect Works:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/microsoft-kinect2.htm

How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect:http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/11/tonights-release-xbox-kinect-how-does-it-work/

Kinect SDK Basichttp://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectQuickstart/

AND OF COURSE GOOGLE AND WIKIPEDIA!!!