Scientists from Microsoft Labs have developed an early prototype of an Xbox gaming avatar that you can quickly customize to look like you, sound like you -- even laugh, sneer or scowl like you.
In this exclusive USA TODAY video, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie describes this skunk works technology: Mundie's notion that this personally customizable, floating-head avatar takes us down the path to development of a full-body avatar is not too hard to imagine. Think of strolling through the holodeck on the Starship Enterprise, or soaring across vast canyons on the mining planet Panador, the setting of Avatar, the blockbuster movie.
Someday soon you might be able to conjure up a gaming avatar that looks and speaks like you to play Xbox Live games. It's one more small step down the path to immersive virtual-reality experiences.
Microsoft has always committed a large part of its resources to research, some of it aimed at "pushing the frontiers of human knowledge," as Peter Lee, new managing director of Microsoft Labs, Redmond, likes to say.
Microsoft's Craig Mundie describes how Kinect is transforming computer interfaces. CAPTION By Byron Acohido Yet there is an elevated buzz at Microsoft Labs these days about the not-so-lofty challenge of making computing devices more useful and user- friendly. Interestingly, it appears to be the hot-selling, $149 Kinect Xbox gaming controller that has gotten some of the really smart guys from Redmond really revved up.
Each Kinect contains a high-resolution RGB video camera, a depth-sensor and a sophisticated microphone array. In less than four months, some 10 million Kinect units have been sold and found their way into homes around the world. Kinect's commercial success has opened vast new research horizons. Microsoft scientists in Oxford, England, for instance, are working on software that will let you use Kinect's video camera and depth sensors to create minutely detailed 3-D images of the interior spaces in your home, including guests sitting on your couch, as long as they sit still. Someday you might be able to use your Kinect controller to virtually try out new furniture or color schemes in a detailed digital replication of your home's interior displayed on your HDTV.
And you won't have to master a cad-cam engineering design program, says Mundie. Researchers are being encouraged to think of Kinect as a primary motion- and voice-activated controller for the computerized home of the not-too-distant future. For starters, Kinect already lets users log onto Xbox Live games and entertainment services just by standing still for a few moments in front of the unit. Its cameras feed sensor data into facial-recognition software. Meanwhile, the mic array feeds data to voice recognition software. Here's something many Kinect owners may not realize: You can use voice commands to play and pause movies routed to your TV by the Xbox Live service. "Natural interaction with computers is most important going forward," says Mundie. "Kinect demonstrates that it's possible -- and appealing."
