The hardware in Kinect 2.0 looks to be amazing where is the software to show it off?

lulz, ¦m•­`6_█¿N§☺it happens to you because you wanted to smile like a sailor instead of swearing like a sailor. Too much smilies is improper grammar, don't punish me Nesh. I think you love cake and you would love a cake emote too.

Edit: Cool it works with PS4 too, it adds to the sport and I can freely swear and curse if I am losing by more than 20 points.

 

The new Kinect is amazing. The system integration, the fitness, wave race demo, auto recognition. It's all awesome.

 

Yeah, now try doing it under a wide variety of lighting conditions. The "simple 2 RGB setup" will probably not do so well.

 

I don't want to inject race into this but the problem I have with most cameras (except the Kinect 2) is that because I am African American, it always has trouble detecting my face. Kinect 2 recognizes me instantly. And the typical environment which I play games in my living room with very low light, I would bet serious money the PS Camera would have difficulty detecting my face or any other gestures with my body.

Kinect 2 shines best with edge cases (low light, harsh light, dark skin tones, etc...). A Caucasian male in a well-light room should be super simple for even a single VGA camera.

My 2 cents.

 

I think most work purely off contrast which is why they would have difficulty detecting your face, and have difficultly in general in low light. I see issues like that all the time with typical face detection on various cameras. Even on my expensive video camera's, if they are used in low light then you can throw reliable face detection out the window. Kinect adds a depth check so it can get around those limitations and hence work in both low light and with various skin tones.

 

I think it would have trouble. I'm white and have no problems doing a facial login with PS4's camera when the room is very well little, such as during the day when natural light is coming through the windows. During the evening though, when that natural light is absent, even though I consider my room is well lit, it's not flooded with light and facial login is quite hit and miss. I think this is because I have no light source directly on my face (i.e. between me and the camera), only off to the side.

 

That is not really a major advantage, it's another plus but imho it's not earth shattering payback on the extra price that the Kinect 2 demands. And i do not expect us to see any crazy stuff the first 1 or 2 years.

In a subtle way Sony has quietly taking out some of what i expected to be exclusive kinect 2 features with the playstation camera and their voice control. They are not surpassing them imho, but just doing enough to make their console able to provide some of the basic features that has been touted as "special" Kinect 2 features.

The ball is again in Microsoft court, i hope they play it back soon

 

They would of had access to similar speced hardware for years at MS (in fact prolly better speced hardware) but anyways theyve had years to play around with this and still we're only seeing the party/dance/fitness etc games

So far we have one kinect 2 game, from the eurogamer review 1/10

OK not a MS game but you've gotta wonder why the hell MS arent doing more to showcase the 'you are the controller' aspect theyve had years
oh I know
limply waves hand in the air 'its coming dont worry'

 

I would expect party, dance and fitness games. Don't get your hopes up. The only thing I really want is a good boxing game. Maybe it can't be done, but it's what I want. Some games might find clever ways to integrate Kinect with traditional gamepad games. The head tracking in battlefield is pretty neat.

 

This is true. You are however able to train it under different conditions. So if you train it once under good light, and once under bad light, PS Cam will pick you up in bad light conditions also.

Kinect face recognition will apparently still need help from regular RGB feed as well, possibly because the 3D info is still too low res for that at reasonable distance. I heard on a podcast where someone's cat was recognised as his wife.

 

Some additional tidbits:

 

The power of kinect is all the little things it gives you, not one or two earth shattering features.

 

Note that for PC users the depth frame hasn't improved, because Kinect on 360 was limited by USB bandwidth available on the 360. PC users of Kinect 1.0 already got 4x the resolution that was available for 360 users.

I do also think that time of flight should give more accurate data, as the old system projected IR points that were then read by an IR camera, whereas here we get light-bouncing directly, so no optical reinterpretation.

 

Its still not that simple. You would have to train it for many possible lighting conditions, and different lighting directions.

The Kinect 2.0 has a IR illuminator and lighting cancellation that will remove ambient lighting effects, which should make facial recognition a lot more accurate.

 

Nah, I don't agree. I do think the time of flight helps a lot with that. For instance, it makes detecting where the head of a person is much easier and faster, so that you can focus on the small area that has the face for trying to detect who is there. And this also seems to be the case in practice - the One seems to detect you much faster than the PS4 (which however in my personal experience does work pretty reliably in general, and ditto for voice recognition).