Kinect technology thread
- Thread starter LightHeaven
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Seems somewhat misplaced effort. Why isn't he using Move? It'll be more accurate. I suppose the background removal is the main benefit here from what he's saying, but then that's working at a very low res and is looking pretty ropey. The Kung Fu Live tech seems better suited for actual video compositing as it's higher resolution.
That does look cool, and I'm sure has the SW fans salivating! For a moment I thought it was supremely good tracking, but then I noticed in the mirror that the prop is the full length, and not as I first thought a short handle with the blade superimposed. This sort of thing, certainly the overlay, is fairly old hat, but the upside of Kinect would be 3D placement of the virtual sabre in the game. I wonder how well it tracks at speed? The demo was a pretty lethargic pace for a Jedi!
Yeah, I was going to mention, that's slow as heck. We know that Move can do this at full jedi speed with no lag. Still, this is all of course all about trying to see what you can do with Kinect, and the variety of stuff people come up with is impressive.
But yeah, Sports Championship's Gladiator Duel has shown more than clearly that the Move is more suitable for this thing. Kinect will do better with Force stuff where you just use your hands, that should be more immersive on that one.
I think it's pretty much guaranteed though that both platforms will have their Star Wars games next year.
At speed, it'll either work flawlessly, or fail misreably. If the rod is being detected per frame regardless of previous position, you'll get 30fps update just fine, and I image that's the case, but it may be that the tracking is much faster when a small delta is involved, and larger displacement require a full image scan which is slower. Ultimately though I'm not sure what Kinect is bringing to this sort of prop-tracking system which was already happening five years ago. With the 3D data, skeleton tracking might make it easier to locate and trace a prop, or if you know it's in front of the player you could perform a depth filter to isolate it more readily. Otherwise this doesn't seem new to me.
I hope they both get excellent implementations with no cheap ports, to really explore what the systems are capable of. Kinect should be able to incorporate some very realistic Jedi movements like a Force Push or levitations or lightning. The closest parallel I can think of so far is Harry Potter, which looked very rough last I saw.
I wasn't comparing it to anything.
LightHeaven
Regular
I guess the biggest advantage is not needing any color segregation on the prop, which means any object can potentially be used, and not just the ones with fluorescent colors and previously known shapes/sizes (for extrapolating depth data).
Kinda makes me want to see someone doing this with just a stick. It will be interesting to see how much can just a depth sensing camera replace all the sensors on the move setup.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
You may not have been, but Arwin was certainly comparing it directly to Move.
Nothing wrong with that.It's interesting and informative to see not only the potential upside of Kinect, but also its potential weaknesses.
Something I've been thinking about recently has been the convergence of a Move type of controller with a Kinect type of skeletal full body tracking. It sounds fantastic in practice but there's some rather large and significant hurdles as I see it.
First of all is just how fast can skeletal tracking can become while keeping the price of such a sensor low enough to be used as an accessory for a console? After all if you can't get the speed significantly faster, you're going to have a problem "meshing" a fast response controller like Move with a slower processing bound skeletal tracking system like Kinect.
I'm curious as to how much processing resources as well as memory and storage resources would be required to even halve the processing lag for skeletal processing.
Thinking about it, just imagine if the camera was sensitive enough to do finger tracking. Not only are you going to almost double the amount of points tracked (20 more points just for 1 joint plus finger tip), but you have to, at the very least, quadruple the number of pixels being processed.
Also interesting to imagine the possibility that one of the main reasons skeletal tracking was moved to the X360 was that it was faster doing it that way. Rather than single threaded processing of skeletal point possibilities, being able to do multiple calculations in parallel was a potentially large increase in tracking speed.
Regards,
SB
(((interference)))
Veteran
With lightsaber/sword games won't lag be a big problem? Like Streets Uncaged?
I imagine anyone trying to do Star Wars kid style moves will find the whole illusion break down very quickly as it will be impossible for Kinect to keep up.
Of course the other big problem with any kind of sword fighting game is that most players will just swing like mad because there's no feedback and so nothing stopping you from just swinging until your arms get tired (at least with fighting/action games you are input limited)
I imagine anyone trying to do Star Wars kid style moves will find the whole illusion break down very quickly as it will be impossible for Kinect to keep up.
Of course the other big problem with any kind of sword fighting game is that most players will just swing like mad because there's no feedback and so nothing stopping you from just swinging until your arms get tired (at least with fighting/action games you are input limited)
Essential DF article about USB speeds limiting Kinect. Makes yer think!
Depends how fast the skeletal tracking updates. If it updates once per frame at 30fps, then it should be fine. The Star Wars kid was recorded at 24 or 30fps and his movements were not invisible to you on video. If the skeletal tracking, for some reason, updates at less than 30fps, then maybe there would be problems. Sure, 60Hz will be more accurate. Watching pro sports on tv, which I'm assuming is either 24, 25 or 30fps, I can see even the fastest movements, so unless you are faster than a professional athlete, the Kinect camera should in theory be fast enough. It won't pick up all the subtleties, but it should track the overall movement without problems. The only way to defeat Kinect is to move into body positions the skeletal tracking does not understand, like crossing your legs or arms, hiding an arm behind your body, or turning completely sideways so it can't see any of your limbs. Otherwise, it seems to track surprisingly well.
TheWretched
Regular
It's not the update frequency, but the lag. If the update from movement to display on character takes several frames, it won't be much fun.
this is homebrew also & it's tracking very fast.
most of the kinect stuff is going to be slow because it has a 30FPS depth camera to do the tracking & has to process that 3D data
I don't see what will make a small homebrew project slower than a full game when it's the full game that has to do more processing for the graphics and other things that's added in.
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To be honest, I think the lag is a lot less important than it actually doing a reasonable job tracking the movements. I'd rather have it respond a little bit slowly than have it not recognize what I'm doing. So far, I think the games don't feel as laggy as they are. I notice it more in Kinect Adventures than in Sports. Sports feels like it responds well enough, even though I've seen vids that demonstrate there is some considerable lag.
The slower the sample rate, the more likely it is to misinterpret movement. 60Hz sampling is going to be better, because there is less error in tracking the movement. I think 30Hz would be about as low as you'd want to go.
not trolling I have Kinect also but what you're asking for has already been done & is part of what lead to PlayStation move being made, besides the not needing a bright color & knowing the size before hand
& Sony has a patent on using real world objects with a Depth Camera to control games so I'm not sure if a dev can do that with a Kinect Game unless it bypass the patent.
That's true of gesture recognition, but not of overlays like this SW demo. It'll just need to find the prop each frame. The concern then would be if the image was sharp enough or sufferes motion blur, which is an issue of exposure duration. If the exposure is 1/60th second, fast motions will be blurred and hard to identify. If exposure is 1/250th second, they'll be sharp. The framerate will be an issue for smoothness of movement; if Kinect were to update 10 fps, with a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second, the images would be blur free but the player would see jerky movement making it a bit awkward. Lag is a third issue, the amount of delay between moving and the game updating with your movements. From user feedback it sounds like that isn't much of a problem.
LightHeaven
Regular
So Kinect is indeed limited by Ms's choice to support non-slims models, not just due to manufacturing costs.
But the part he says kinect cameras are actually high res cameras left wondering, if ms went to much higher res than needed for now, in order to keep current kinect when their new console launches.
It would be really cool to instantly benefit from a higher res camera without the need to buy a new for their next console...
But Ms's full body tracking does not seems to take several frames, every time they show kinect's vision, among their skeletal tracking they are always in sync, and the video feed is just barely delayed, just like all usb cameras are. Even by watching move footage you can see that the video feed is a little bit behind, and that's a 60fps camera XD
I don't take that as trolling
But using color + known shapes/sizes is exactly what sony is doing in those tech demos and Move. There's even a video where a dev shows how move tracking works and that you can hide parts of the ball so Ps3 thinks the stick moved back.
There's nothing wrong in that, as it can be very freaking precise, but i just kinda want to see how far can just a depth sensor camera go in that department
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Interesting point. Do we know the specific part for the camera? Just wondering if it's a part that can do 60fps at a higher resolution. Maybe next gen will only require a software/firmware update. Definitely an interesting idea that I hadn't considered.
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