Kinect technology thread

The stuff these guys come up with continues to impress me. Hopefully in the next generation of Kinect, MS and/or Primesense will be able to reduce the lag more.

What's interesting is that MS have been able to achieve far lower lag than the only other competing device by Asus. Although the Asus unit being in alpha or even pre-alpha stages isn't exactly a fair comparison.

Regards,
SB
 
Twisted pixel goes into a little more depth on how their Kinect controls work:
http://twistedpixelgames.com/wordpress/2011/02/09/designing-for-kinect/


It's a bit hand-wavey... :D

Hope someone going to Pax East will report on how well it controls. :)

This looks awesome

Haha, I love how a foot stomp is actually a foot stomp. I always forgot to use that in the first Dead Space, Kinect makes it almost an instinctive reflex action.

Same goes with the reaching to screen for the telekinesis grab, that's the kind of intuitive controls I envision in games as motion controls mature.

As well using the WiiMote as a physical gun for aiming and shooting. Just like in real life you need tools in addition to just your body to accomplish things, in more advance core type (and even casual I'd imagine) we need to see body + tool to replicate things that can be done in real life.

It's in this area where I get excited when thinking of Move coming to PC. In conjuntion with true full body motion controls (Via Kinect or other Primesense derivative camera) it will excel as a "tool" object (gun, shovel, torch, whatever) in games.

That video truly shows some of the great potential of incorporating instinctive human reactions into games such that it is intuitive and triggered almost by reflex.

Regards,
SB
 
Lean left, right, forward, and back to move. I think running in place triggers the run action in game. The YouTube site has his key bindings under the video.

Code:
Kinect - FAAST 
WiiRemote(RightHands) - Glovepie

FAAST 0.06 Sample Setting

lean_left 12 key a
lean_right 12 key d
lean_forwards 17 key w
lean_backwards 5 key s
walk 5 key left_shift
right_arm_forwards 15 mouse_click right_button
left_arm_forwards 22 key f
right_arm_up 7 key r
jump 20 key left_alt
right_foot_up 15 key space
left_arm_across 15 key q
left_arm_out 15 mouse_click left_button
left_arm_up 15 key c
right_arm_out 15 key b

The Wiimote controls his view like a mouse.

Regards,
SB
 
First 15 minutes of The Gunstringer for Kinect. It seems a lot of fun and the controls are easy to understand, plus they work well taking into account your character is a marionette. The blend of a videogame and matinee is so appealing to me.


Some parts of the video are hilarious.
 
Looks like MS have improved the body part recognition algorithms...

The basic process involves analyzing millions of 3D depth maps that were pre-labeled with identifiable body parts -- such as arms, legs and torso. A server consisting of 1,000 cores analyzed roughly a million of these images each day, compiling the aggregate results into a series of trees that could successfully identify the body parts quickly without the identifying data.

Once the trees are fully built, they're used to probabilistically guess a specific body part for each bit of 3D pixel data taken in by Kinect. Finally, the system uses these pixels to assign positions for the joints that make up the skeleton of a character's 3D model.

The researchers claim the Xbox 360 GPU can perform this pattern recognition process in under 5 ms -- a rate of over 200 frames per second -- which the team says is "at least one order of magnitude faster than existing approaches."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...d_For_Identifying_Player_Bodies_On_Kinect.php

Gamasutra reference this PDF & this website & video...

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/1...e/2176-kinects-ai-breakthrough-explained.html


Tommy McClain
 
Any idea how much computational power of the GPU would be in use during each 5ms? Im assuming its not saying that each 'pattern recognition process' takes 5ms of GPU time in a absolute sense.
 
Looks like the lag will be mainly dominated by the refresh rate of the camera. New frame comes every 33ms(30fps camera). If you need multiple frames(gesture recognition) lag will be 33ms*needed frames count + gpu time + other latencies involved.
 
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