The Inside Story of Microsoft's 'Project Natal' 130
Lanxon writes "Wired has published a lengthy behind-the-scenes feature documenting the inception, development and technological struggles of Microsoft's Project Natal, now known as Kinect. The feature is the result of conversations the magazine had with a number of key developers and researchers behind the project, and unprecedented access to Microsoft Research in a number of countries, over the course of three years."
Re:Waste of R&D dollars, if you ask me (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually most projects in Microsoft Research never come close to making any money, they are just meant to be feeder projects for future products. The fact that this one came to market so quickly is really unique.
Most people forget how much money some of the big companies like Microsoft and IBM put into pure research efforts (i.e. no immediate plan for a ROI)
“History is about to be rewritten"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
“Since the dawn of time, humanity’s long journey has led us to countless discoveries, Yet with each leap forward for civilisation, more people have been left behind. But our quest has taken us to a completely new horizon. History is about to be rewritten. This time human beings will be at the centre -- and the machines will be the ones that adapt. After five million years of evolution, is it possible that the future of humanity is humanity itself?”
That the article repeats verbatim such a quote from Microsoft's presentation without even a slight nod to the gross self-aggrandization clued me to the fact that the whole piece is yet another corporate advertisement disguised as news.
I mean, in addition to the whole story starting with an emergency meeting on mid 2007 about the need to "reimagine a new direction for the Xbox" yet failing to point out it was all due to the runaway success of the Wii. It actually sticks out like a sore thumb to see these VPs panicking about something that the article refuses to acknowledge exists.
Why Does This Seem Familiar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does Kinect seem familiar? Microsoft saying "It will change the industry" and "Big players are developing it" and "You'll wonder how you ever did anything without it!" and "Everything will change after this". Oh yeah, this is what they said with Windows Mobile 6.
The more reports I get back the more it seems like just with Windows Mobile 6 that marketing is over promising features. That isn't to say Kinect is "snake oil" because of a lot of it does seem to work but that it is rough...."rougher" than they want to let on. So we'll get a big advertising blitz, Microsoft will declare it was a huge success, and then summary die because it is expensive and never quite work as smooth as they advertised while the competition runs wild. All of this is like WinMo6.
Anyhow, there is some merit to the tech but it feels like it is going in the wrong direction. Its like the belief one can effectively replace a keyboard with voice recognition. VR is useful in itself but not as a keyboard replacement! As an HMI issue, gesture controls found on Wii "work" because the interface is simplified not because of waggle. Replacing waggle sticks with Kinect without doing the requisite "simplification" is going to be a disaster. I wish they would abandon schemes like "replacing the controller for games" that are more smoke and mirrors than practical execution. Go with practical stuff like if my console notices I put the controller down to answer the phone, door, kids jump in my lap, or whatever, pause the game. If the console notice I'm no long in front of my TV for an extended period of time, go into hibernate mode. Stuff like this is more useful than trying to figure out how build a fighting game by waving my arms and kicking with my legs.
But in any event, $150us is too much for all of it. If it was built in at the start that would be one thing but it is too late now.
No other option than to pedal this junk for MS (Score:1, Insightful)
What was Microsoft going to do?
They had been in the console market for 8 years and have gotten nowhere. Some 7 or 8 billion in losses - much higher if you calculate how many other products in Microsoft's E&D division have been hiding the true Xbox generated losses. They have no hardware design and manufacturing capabilities to be able to compete with Sony. They have a joke internal game development studio array - only 3 or so first party studios compared to Sony's gigantic 21 or so and Nintendo with 10.
The 360 is dead in Asia just like the first Xbox. The 360 is dead all across Europe outside of the UK just like the first Xbox. No one at Microsoft is any mood to let the idiots running the Xbox project have a few more billion to make new Xbox hardware with Baller's Google obsession blowing through billions every year and Microsoft's stock price completely dead in the water.
So they bought a company with old PS2 Eye Toy style motion recognition hardware and slapped it on the old defective 360 hardware. Better than just killing the Xbox disaster outright. They might be able to milk another year of so 60 dollar a year online fees out of the suckers paying for it now. Won't come close to paying for the billions Microsoft wasted on the Xbox disaster, but its better than nothing.
Time for Microsoft to turn their attention to the fucked up and dying PC games market. The large number of big name PC game developers supporting the Mac while they fuck around with the piece of shit Xbox 360 has to be sending off alarms for the people who do actually make a successful product at Microsoft, their OS software. If you can start to play most major games on Macs I could easily see OS X jumping into the 20-30 percent range in marketshare.
3rd try's a charm? Kinect: The 3rd Wiimote killer (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to sound cynical, but this will only be the 3rd Wiimote killer since the 6-axis took it's aim. With all of Kinect's extra features over the de facto, it should fit really nicely next to all of the iPod-killers of yor.
The Kinect is the Firewire of the Firewire-USB war. Overly expensive and unsupported compared to it's contemporary cousin even if it may have better technology. It only takes a (USB2-style) revision to make the things Kinect has moot and the populace moves on...
Re:Waste of R&D dollars, if you ask me (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, I think things like Move and Kinect are really just ramping up for the next generation of console equipment that will have this stuff as standard. I doubt they're counting on doing anymore than breaking even, if that for now. Getting developers onboard and used to the tech so that they could really push it next gen is probably a good thing too- look how many 3rd party developers really struggled to take advantage of the Wii, most stuff that's been churned out since release has been utter crap, and it's taken a while to get some good 3rd party stuff out there.
There was a story some weeks ago about how Natal could previously even read sign language, and detect finger gestures, but to make the equipment fit in the $150 price range they switched to a lower resolution IR camera. I'd imagine they'll put the higher resolution back in for the next gen console so FPS players can issue commands with hand gestures and that sort of thing, which they could've done this time if they'd made Natal prohibitively more expensive. I guess the technology is too new and expensive to really push it to it's limits right now, but by the time the XBox 720 or whatever comes out it may not be.
I'm also not sure at least in the case of Natal (I don't know about Move) that the R&D will be wasted even if it flops in gaming. I'd imagine hands free interfaces are something Microsoft is hoping to capitalise on elsewhere in the future. It's like things like multi-touch and gesture recognition, it's not new, but it's really come into it's own in recent years finding it's way on mobile devices and becoming a must have feature. It may be that Natal wiill find it's niche in for example TVs, to provide hands free control of them or something like that.
Re:Waste of R&D dollars, if you ask me (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry. Much falseness here.
First of all, the on-board processor was dropped. Kinect places its entire processing load on the 360 (putting a 10-15 % load on the CPU).
Second, the "regular camera" in it runs at 640x480 30Hz, which is bad enough, but the infrared projector runs at 320x240, which is abysmal and the reason the device cannot detect things like finger movements.
The device is not ambitious at all; it's old tech. We've been doing depthmaps from two image sources for about as long as we've had cameras. The fact that Microsoft has made several cuts in hardware and functionality and is still pricing the device at $150 is disheartening, although not surprising given their pricing on things like proprietary hard drives.
Basically, it's overpriced junk that could be not just matched but beaten on any computer or on the PS3 by two webcams, two microphones, and a 5k program (total cost: $60). I would applaud them for pushing development of userspace control, but what's far more likely to happen is this thing is going to bomb hard enough to scare investors away for the next thirty years. They are actually hurting the market.