CNN: Kinect is impressive

[youarebadatgames]

Icyedge said:

Smidlee said:

 

What do you think this statement really means?

"What Natal does, is it evaluates effectively trillions of body configurations every frame. We've made it do that 30 times a second."

 X360 does not even have  a trillion bits.  Trillion is a really huge number. I've heard that  a trillion dollars in 100 dollar bills would stack in a pile that's 67 miles high.

It means that Natal select 1 body position (the one your in) out of trillions of different possible body configuration 30 time per second. Simply mean that it check your body configuration/position at 30 FPS.

In other words, while theres trillions of possible body position each frame, Natal will know yours. Its just that, but it was worded to look more awesome.

If not you were right in the sense that no super computer can evaluate trillions of body configuration 30 times per second. Tough, it can evaluate one out of those trillions possibilities.

The keyword here is "effectively", it probably does some sort of statistical inference per pixel to determine whether or not it is 1) part of a person, and 2) position in relation to the joints.  It doesn't mean that Natal is doing the work of 1 trillion body positions if the effective algorithm can come up with the same result with far less calculations.

Anybody can google scholar his papers.  One of his was getting sign language recognition to work on a 600mhz laptop with a webcam, a problem that was previously too computationally intensive.  It's not unbelievable that the tech has been advanced to a point that it can finally run on something as simple as an xbox.