Is this based on visible light (i.e. the redder the face the higher the heart rate) or infrared (the hotter the face the higher the heart rate)?

If IR then it will work across all skintones. If visible light then won't it have a harder time reading the change in skin blood flow for darker skinned people?

All I've seen is that Kinect will read the bloodflow in the face, but I haven't read what EM wavelength will be used for this purpose.

Foolishness like this makes me want to cry. How the hell does this improve gaming? This seems more like something that will be used to gauge customer reaction to an add, tv program, or sports event.

speaking of sports, heat won:)

This is downright pointless. And creepy.

Same can be said for your sig...

Noooooooooooo.

I can see how this would be usefull. Fitness games can track the effort you put in and so forth, plus if you couple it with the expression recognition you could dynamically alter the difficulty if it looked like someone was about to rage quit.

The redness of the face? Then it will take a reference or what? I thought that the only reliable way is to "see" the minuscule changes in the face vanes or something. If that were the case, I would be well impressed.

Not facial veins for sure because veins are not pulsatile, arteries are. I highly doubt it will work reliably, in the hospital we use pulse oximetry which goes through ur finger nail or ear lobe, has two wave lengths, subtracts one from the other and caclulates teh difference between background blood (mixed arterial and venous), against each pulse (oxygenated blood).

I am pretty sure Kinect cannot do this from a distance. Adam Sessler also made a mistake saying it displaces an EKG, which is not possible, EKG requires many leads placed on the chest, u can't do that with the pulse. I can put money on it that it will not be able to detect pulse correctly, too many variation in skin tone as well as human anatomy. Not everyone's carotid artery is exactly in the same damn place either...

I have an extremely high level of skeptism when i saw those videos from Adam Sessler. They show this graph with peak and trough looks like it "could" be the HR, but they never really measured it agains the person's actual pulse, we don't actually know if it works...

I thought it was a combination of both

Yea, I think it's using the Infa Red, changes, and looking for a pulse (I guess in you neck?)

As xwan point it, it may not really work that well. But then, this time of flight stuff they are doing with Kinect 2 is rather impressive. Kinect 1 has been used to map caves, and all sorts of non gaming uses.

I think it both sounds cool and is a little bit creepy. I could see how they could use it on a game say, like Alan Wake, to keep making it hard for you by seeing if you are 'stressed enough' before opening a door, or letting you move onto a new level.

I wonder if it could also give alerts? My friend Glen had a heart attack after playing his new PS3 for 3 days. He was super excited and saved up for a long time. Then played for a long time.