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Kinect Apps Challenge
Graphics & Media Lab and Microsoft Research Cambridge have announced a contest for applications that use Kinect sensor. The authors of the five brightest apps will be funded to attend the 2012 Microsoft Research PhD summer school. I blogged about the last year's event in my previous post. Details of the contest are here.
I guess there's no need to explain what Kinect is. It is extremely successful combined colour and depth sensor by Microsoft. It is being distributed for killer price (≈$150) as an add-on for Xbox, although it is hard to imagine the range of possible applications. Controlling a computer only by gestures is considered as a primer of natural user interface. To name some applications beyond gaming, this kind of NUI is useful to help surgeons to keep their hands clean:
Kinect helps blind people to navigate through buildings:
For more ideas look at the winners of OpenNI challenge.
OpenNI is an open-source alternative to Kinect SDK. Its strong point is it is integrated with PCL, but beware that you cannot use it for the contest. Only Kinect for Windows SDK is allowed.
Kinect is probably the most successful commercial outcome from the Microsoft Research lab. MSR is unique because they do a lot of theoretical research there, and it is unclear if it is profitable for Microsoft to fund it. But the projects like Kinect reveal the doubts. I will post about MSR organization in comparison to other industrial labs in one of the later posts.
23 November 2013 at 04:03
It's pretty insane the potential applications for something that is marketed as a game controller.
I think this is a common application but a friend of mine used his to make a 3D object modeller. He would wave the Kinect around a chair and it will gather point data, do some light processing and then dump the object into Blender. Really cool stuff.
"Leadership is not the will to command but the will to serve those under you." -Halden A Zimmermann
"The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now." –Bill Cosby
1 April 2017 at 00:13
computer blindness is an issue just like color blindness, because in today's world, computers are used everywhere and its hard when a person cannot work on them.