| JaggedSac said: As Squilliam said, Kinect is mainly a piece of software. Software that will be upgraded regularly no doubt. Sitting on a couch is a difficult problem solve as the furniture and person become mixed together in the depth map. They will probably have to use a completely different solution than a skeletal system. Which is another big thing with Kinect, MS could add completely unthought of functionality in an update. Which is an interesting concept, as input devices are usually set in stone in their functionality once the hardware is complete. |
But Microsoft does not have unlimited freedom in changing the Kinect libraries because it has to stay compatible with previous releases. For example, it was said that the Kinect libraries requires 10% of the Xbox 360's total processing power. Developers usually try do get the maximum out of a console, so they will try to optimize it to using the remaining 90%. Now let's imagine Microsoft releases an improved Kinect library. It uses an improved algorithm for scanning the player's skeletal system that also works with sitting people, but this improved algorithm also has a disadvantage: Instead of 10%, it now uses 13% of the 360's total processing power. 3% more is not really that much, but still you could not simply update the Kinect libraries because the games released so far were optimized to use 90% of the processing power, not 87%.
