iFixit Tears Down Microsoft's Kinect For Xbox 360 280
alphadogg writes "Microsoft's new hands-free Kinect game controller is packed with four microphones, two autofocus cameras and a motion detector chip that together make for one heck of a complex toy, according to iFixit's initial teardown of the device. 'We haven't been this excited to get our hands on new hardware since the iPad,' says Kyle Wiens, CEO of the company. 'The way that we interact with computers is (finally) evolving, and Kinect is unlike any hardware we've ever taken apart. In fact, the only thing we've ever taken apart that has anywhere close to this many sensors is Pleo, the dinosaur robot.' iFixit describes Kinect as 'a horizontal bar of sensors connected to a small, motorized pivoting base.' The $150 device that Microsoft put hundreds of millions of dollars of research into can be purchased separately from the Xbox 360 or as part of a bundle. A Prime Sense PS1080-A2 is at the heart of Kinect's motion detection capabilities, as it connects to all of Kinect's sensors and processes images of your game room's color and scope before shooting them over to the Xbox. iFixit couldn't immediately identify all of the chips within the box, so plans to update its teardown."
Open source driver news.. (Score:4, Informative)
I can't believe the summary didn't mention the $2000 bounty reward for making an open source driver.
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the-ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/ [adafruit.com]
Ask iFixit anything (Score:5, Informative)
I started iFixit, and I wrote today's teardown. I'm also a long-time /. member.
I totally dig the anti-Microsoft sentiment. But just like with the iPad, we've got real innovation here that came out of a closed environment. Microsoft's got hundreds of millions of dollars invested in visual motion recognition and speech recognition technology. The best reaction all of us in the open source community can have is to use this innovation as a call to action, and as building a block to write open tools. Adafruit's contest is a fantastic start, and I'll be supporting that any way I can.
Got any questions about the hardware that I didn't address in the teardown? Fire away.
Kyle Wiens
Re:Pictures of unsold Kinect boxes at the launch (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Worst Console Add-on Ever (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kinects In Stores Everywhere (Score:2, Informative)
the OP is spot on for lag (Score:5, Informative)
Highs:
* Just plain fun
* Limitless potential, could move beyond gaming.
* New, innovative technology will only get better.
Lows:
* $150 price on top of Xbox 360 console
* Half-second of inherent lag
* Fairly basic games
* Only handles two players at a time
german summry [gamecaptain.de]
Approximative transaltion in english :
The setup is a problem too. So kinect needs really much place and has problem with light. One tester from joystiq was not
recognized due to his glasses, because it was reflecting too much light.
Whoever want to paly to 2 needs 3 meter of free palce from TV (9 foot aprox) which needs a lot of moving furniture by many.
Which means also that the dashboard features like move command cannot be used when one want to do only a to watch a film, not to play.
Also the price is critized.
IGN video review linked ina rticle [youtube.com]
Mixed reviews for kinect [i4u.com]
My verdict from what i all read : the lag will probably limit it to games where it is not too important (casual family game, or game where a 1/3 to 1/5 second lag has no impact). Tech looks good and could be a revolution, but at the moment too expensive. Wait and see for Kinect 1.2 with a good offering of games.
Re:Ask iFixit anything (Score:5, Informative)
the difference between a tear down and a review is a tear down normally involves getting out tools and dissembling the product while a review is just talking about the product.
Re:Won't Be On The Market Long Enough To Matter (Score:2, Informative)
Just as an observation, in the live demos they were doing in the Macy's windows in NYC a week or two ago there was only about 3-4 feet of width and roughly 6-7 feet of open space in front of the Kinect. I would say the demoer was roughly about 5' away, and had just enough room to swing her arms. That's a much better representation of a living room than most stage demos, and the Kinect was still picking up all her movements just fine.
Re:Won't Be On The Market Long Enough To Matter (Score:1, Informative)
The AVERAGE modest American living room has about 250 sq ft or about 16' x 16' and that in my opinion is on the small side.My kinect is way more than adaquate for the space I have,(it's not huge)Where are you writing from?I know Japan, by sheer volume has to minimize personal space,but it sounds you are from the UK, you guys are that tight also?
Re:MS Had To Cap Pre-Orders Due To Demand (Score:3, Informative)
Not a single mention of the number of pre-orders, so it's a worthless piece of information ("Both units pre-ordered" becomes "ALL OUR PREORDERS SOLD OUT AND STILL PEOPLE ASK FOR MORE!").
Also, there hasn't been a product in the video games industry in the last 20 years that didn't "sell out" at launch. It's completely arbitrary. It all depends on how many you produce and/or how many you decide to "let" people pre-order, nothing else. They estimate they'll sell 3 million - is that good or bad? I have no idea. The Wii has sold 75 million. Is that comparable? If just one in 20 Wii owners has a WiiMotionPlus or a WiiFit that makes the 3 million *estimated* sales worthless. To quote the wiki "As of May 2010, {Wii Sports Resort} has sold 16.14 million copies" and they come with a WiiMotionPlus, so that's the estimated sales blown out of the water almost 5-fold. Is that relevant?
Pre-orders mean precisely NOTHING. Thousands of pre-order still exist for Duke Nukem Forever - doesn't mean they've sold any or that the product even exists. And "selling out of pre-orders" means that the arbitrary number that MS decided was reserved for pre-orders has been met with the same number of potential buyers. That's it.
Don't tell me pre-orders, and if you do state FIGURES - tell me confirmed sales. The stock they sell to the big stores MONTHS before official product release is the only number that means anything, and even that doesn't predict whether shops will ever order any more.
Re:A ourney of a Thousand Miles... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, there are a couple of PhD theses that went into this PrimeSense stuff. They were done in around 2003 to 2007 I think. One of the last Kinect stories featured here on /. was a look back at the product development and it listed the names of some people hinted at their academic works. The people got subsequently hired to work on this stuff. Looking that up will give you a start in researching the science/tech background. The basis is hard science and it has been published. It works not because it does pure image recognition, but because it tries to fit a sophisticated model of a human body into the data gathered from the image. Seemingly, this adds enough reliability to turn it into a consumer device.
Re:A ourney of a Thousand Miles... (Score:3, Informative)
I agree with you that plain image processing is bloody hard to get working reliably. Making it work in uncontrolled conditions is additional orders of magnitude harder.
As far as I understand it - not having looked into it too closely - the image data is mostly interpreted based on expected human poses extrapolated from previous frames using a 3D skeleton. That is, it's not just image recognition. There's a (statistical?) model of human movement in there as well and as far as I understand it, the image data without this particular model wouldn't make any sense at all. Not wanting to research this more deeply I'd estimate that possible poses that fit to the picture (which may be a lot) are weighted by how likely it is that the human body could have shifted into that position since the last frame and the most likely one is picked.
Re:cost cutting (Score:3, Informative)
You seem to be confused. Sony is the mfr. that removes features to lower costs. MS removes your ability to access software-driven features like multiplayer, Facebook, and Netflix unless you pay for a subscription. True, this is a bit like arguing over who's the fattest kid at fat camp, but there it is.
Re:Ask iFixit anything (Score:2, Informative)