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Forums - Microsoft - Source: MS quadrupling Kinect accuracy

Shadowblind on 17 December 2010
Nsanity said:

 

Microsoft is working to improve the accuracy of Xbox 360 motion-sensing add-on Kinect so that it could detect finger movement and hand rotation, Eurogamer understands.

Microsoft's Kinect team is said to be working "very hard" on a switching or compression technology that will allow a greater amount of data to pass through Kinect to the Xbox 360 console.

Misleading title. Microsoft is clearly only trying to improve Kinect to then rub it in our faces that they will not release it as an update. Makes perfect sense.

Also . . . "quadruple"?

You got my hopes up too, Nsanity . . .



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hobbit on 17 December 2010
ArnoldRimmer said:

I'm sceptic about this. As far as I understood the article, it's pretty much just speculation by Eurogamer.

There are more problems than just USB bandwidth. First of all, using 640x480 instead of 320x240 from the depth sensor would mean the Kinect algorithms would have to process four times the data. If they weren't magically able to massively reduce the processing time Kinect needs, such a step would make Kinect's performance even worse because it would increase the lag even more.

The other problem is that the real resolution of the depth sensor would only increase by a small amount. On a normal webcam/digital camera, using 640x480 instead of 320x240 does of course result in four times the resolution. In the case of the distance sensor inside Kinect however, the real resolution is neither 640x480 nor 320x240, it's the number of infrared points the device projects into the room. (as seen in this video for example: http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion/30/what-kinect-looks-like-through-ir-goggles-points-of-laser-light/464521/). And that number doesn't even increase by switching from 320x240 to 640x480. So using 640x480 would increase the accuracy a tiny bit, but the disadvantage of additional processing time might easily outweigh the small accuracy advantage. Most people would probably prefer the current accuracy with less lag than slightly better accuracy with even more lag.

Depends on what the developer wants, If it's just a dance game then they don't need to process that many pixels to track the skeleton.  You want to do just the fingers then you can use the lower res buffer to find them and on the next pass use the higher res to read the fingers and ignore the rest of the screen. It's sort like the new Anti aliasing and other post processes that only need to find the edges in the image to work. Smart work is faster work.



thranx on 18 December 2010

Thats exciting news. Don't know how plausible it is but i have wondered why pcs have been able to detect fingers but the 360 could not



tingyu on 18 December 2010

M$ always push out faulty products, and improve them later. Remember Vista? Or Xbox 360 itself?



Potable_Toe on 18 December 2010
tingyu said:

M$ always push out faulty products, and improve them later. Remember Vista? Or Xbox 360 itself?

Or the orginal Xbox... hold on, what?  :|

 

OT: If this is actually doable then this could well be a step in the right direction to make this a properly viable technology for more complex games. Add in the, as of yet missing (as far as i am aware), feature to scan in objects and to work in tandem with the pad and you have yourself a very flexible set-up.