Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect To See World 124
kkleiner writes "A student at MIT's Personal Robotics Group is going to put Microsoft's Kinect to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery-powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel's creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go."
In related but less agreeable news, "Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."
Re:biometrics lurk (Score:3, Funny)
Solution: wear sunglasses when you play Kinect games!
Feature Request #42: (Score:5, Funny)
Hand gesture to "make me a sandwich". Wait iRobot says No? Okay, gesture "sudo make me a sandwich" :-)
Re:Less ad money? (Score:3, Funny)
Thankfully Disney has prior art on this, with ads on DVDs that cannot be skipped
Re:biometrics lurk (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Feature Request #42: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course. It's way to dangerous to just let anyone in there, what with my woman chained to the sink.
Re:Less ad money? (Score:3, Funny)
And deploys sofabelts that prevent you from getting up and walking away while it applies glue to hold your eyes open.