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Microsoft may be struggling to sell phones, but over in Xbox 360 land, things are going crazy. The Kinect controller-free controller has sold a whopping 2.5-million units in just 25 days.

The Kinect, which uses a combination of infra-red projectors and various cameras to track puny humans in their living rooms and therefrom control the on-screen action, has been a success since the pre-sale queues on launch-day, something usually seen in only the cultish world of Apple. And with the sales of Nintendo’s Wii declining after years of sold-out, hard-to-find success, it’s looking like the Kinect will be the new king of jumping-around-in-front-of-the-TV-and-looking-stupid this holiday season.

And don’t just take my word for it. Microsoft is optimistic in its press release, predicting five million units sold this Christmas, hopefully combating the festive flab with a bit of game-related exercise. Here’s a money-making tip for any speedy games developers out there: Write a Kinect-compatible game called “Guilty Gym Membership” and get it in stores for January 1st 2011, and you’ll be very rich indeed.

Xbox 360 Surpasses 2.5 Million Kinect Sensors Sold [Microsoft]

Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

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The prototype for Microsoft’s Kinect camera and microphone famously cost $30,000. At midnight tonight, the company is releasing it as a motion-capture Xbox 360 peripheral for $150.

Microsoft is projecting that it will sell five million units between now and Christmas. It’s worth taking some time to think about what’s happening here.

I’ve used Kinect to play video games without a controller, watch digital movies without a remote, and do audio-video chat from across the room. I’ve spent even more time researching the technology behind it and explaining how it works.

Kinect’s camera is powered by both hardware and software. And it does two things: generate a three-dimensional (moving) image of the objects in its field-of-view and recognize (moving) human beings among those objects.


Older software programs used differences in color and texture to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. PrimeSense, the company whose tech powers Kinect, and recent Microsoft acquisition Canesta use a different model. The camera transmits invisible near-infrared light and measures its time of flight after it reflects off the objects.

Time-of-flight works like sonar: if you know how long the light takes to return, you know how far away an object is. Cast a big field, with lots of pings going back and forth at the speed of light, and you can know how far away a lot of objects are.

Using an infrared generator also partially solves the problem of ambient light, which can throw off recognition like a random finger on a touchscreen: the sensor really isn’t designed to register visible light, so it doesn’t get quite as many false positives.

PrimeSense and Kinect go one step further and encode information in the near-IR light. As that information is returned, some of it is deformed — which in turn can help generate a finer image of those objects’ three-dimensional texture, not just their depth.

With this tech, Kinect can distinguish objects’ depth within 1cm and their height and width within 3mm.

Figure from PrimeSense Explaining the PrimeSensor Reference Design.

At this point, both the Kinect’s hardware — its camera and IR light projector — and its firmware (sometimes called “middleware”) of the receiver are operating. It has an onboard processor which is using algorithms to process the data to render the three-dimensional image.

The middleware also can recognize people: both distinguishing human body parts, joints, and movements and distinguishing individual human faces from one another. When you step in front of it, the camera knows who you are.

Please note: I’m keenly aware here of the standard caution against anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. But at a certain point, we have to accept that if the meaning of “to know” is its use, in the sense of familiarity, connaissance, whatever you want to call it, functionally, this camera knows who you are. It’s got your image — a kind of biometric — and can map it to a persona with very limited encounters, as naturally and nearly as accurately as a street cop looking at your mug shot and fingerprints.

Does it “know” you in the sense of embodied neurons firing, or the way your mother knows your personality or your priest your soul? Of course not. It’s a video game.


But it’s a pretty remarkable video game. You can’t quite get the fine detail of a table tennis slice, but the first iteration of the WiiMote couldn’t get that either. And all the jury-rigged foot pads and Nunchuks strapped to thighs can’t capture whole-body running or dancing like Kinect can.

That’s where the Xbox’s processor comes in: translating the movements captured by the Kinect camera into meaningful on-screen events. These are context-specific. If a river rafting game requires jumping and leaning, it’s going to look for jumping and leaning. If navigating a Netflix Watch Instantly menu requires horizontal and vertical hand-waving, that’s what will register on the screen.

It has an easier time recognizing some gestures and postures than others. As Kotaku noted this summer, recognizing human movement — at least, any movement more subtle than a hand-wave — is easier to do when someone is standing up (with all of their joints articulated) than sitting down.

So you can move your arms to navigate menus, watch TV and movies, or browse the internet. You can’t sit on the couch wiggling your thumbs and pretending you’re playing Street Fighter II. It’s not a magic trick cooked up by MI-6. It’s a camera that costs $150.

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Xbox 360’s long-awaited dashboard update is here, bringing a slew of new features, including a nice bonus from Netflix: an improved search UI and support for Netflix streaming on Windows Phone 7.

Let’s take the Xbox first. Xbox Live’s Major Nelson writes that the 360 dashboard update is available today and rolling out to everyone (regardless of your geography!) over Xbox Live.

That was penned this morning; if you’re reading this now, you’ve probably gotten the update. If not, signing in again might work, but bear in mind this warning: “If you keep signing out and then back in again, this will NOT force the updateit will only anger people on your friends list who will keep getting a notification. every. time. you sign. in…Be patient, everyone will eventually receive the update.” Well said.

The headlining features of the Xbox update are the new ESPN hub and Zune music. You’ve got to be an Xbox Gold subscriber to take advantage of most of them. Zune Music or ZunePass is exactly what it sounds like: subscription-based streaming music, with baked-in search.

The ESPN hub promises 3,500 live, on-demand and DVRed global sporting events from ESPN3.com annually. The selection is arguably stronger than any other digital set-top box: college basketball and football to US pro baseball and basketball and international soccer, golf and tennis, whether they’re in or out of your local market. No NFL or NHL, but sports junkies are one step closer cutting the cable cord. If only it could have rolled out in the summertime: we’d all be watching baseball, tennis and soccer and it would have taken everyone three months to notice.

ESPN also gets to leverage some of the Xbox Live social networking features, including group chat while you’re watching a game. (The chat software itself is also reportedly improved.) English Premier League fans won’t even have to leave home to heckle their friends. That is, assuming you’ve all got Xboxes.

And then there’s Netflix. Xbox Live Gold users have had discless Netflix streaming for a long time now, and it’s only been in the last few months that other consoles have caught up. Now the original Xbox gets an update too, with an improved search UI.

Plus, Netflix put a cherry on top: just like the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 is getting Netflix Watch Instantly too via a free application, which will be available at the phone’s launch.

One last Xbox 360 detail that I think is important: the new dashboard overhauls the parental controls and family programming settings. Netflix, Sports, Chat, Kinect, the casual Xbox games on WP7: all of these together suggest that Microsoft is strongly re-positioning the Xbox as a living room hub for the entire family, not just where college kids and devoted gamers blast away on Halo while their friends and families leave to do something else.

Some of those gamers are already reacting, saying that the new games for WP7 and Kinect are too watered-down, don’t offer enough of what they’re used to. I think it’s a really good thing, based on the premise that the value of any box attached to your television set increases proportionally with the number of valuable things you can do with it.

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Console Wars
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“There is nothing more sad or glorious than generations changing hands,” John Cougar Mellencamp wrote in the liner notes to his classic album, Scarecrow.

And so it goes with the handover from the Gamecube and PS2 to the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360: Gaming systems that we once loved are thrown into the dustbin of history, while strange new devices take center stage.

Here’s one way to look at those market shifts: With an interactive infographic from Tableau Software.

In addition to the console trends, you can watch Nintendo gain market share at Sony’s expense (while Microsoft hangs in there at a steady level).

The data, from NPD Group, is not particularly new, but the visualization is. If you ever wondered what a generational shift in technologies looks like, here you go.

What other tech data would you like to see visualized? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks, Ellie!

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

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When Microsoft and Facebook announced that they were partnering to integrate Facebook and Bing for social-network-powered search, it confirmed something I thought Monday: Windows Phone 7 is the real Facebook phone.

I don’t know whether Facebook has a secret team working on a phone where they control the OS. But they don’t need one. They’re already deeply integrated into Android and iOS. Now with the Microsoft partnership, they’re tied to the most socially-optimized smartphone ever brought to the market.

“This is, I think, one of the most exciting partnerships we’ve done on the platform so far,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Bing announcement Wednesday. “Our view is that over the next five years we expect that almost every industry is going to be disrupted by someone building a great product that’s deep in whatever area that industry is, plus is extremely socially integrated.”

The first Windows Phone 7 handsets are due in stores November. The OS is Microsoft’s complete do-over on mobile after its predecessor Windows Mobile tanked in popularity and market share in the wake of more consumer-savvy handsets such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android-powered smartphones.

Every aspect of Windows Phone 7 is geared around social networks: phone, contacts, gaming, photos, even Office. Focusing the phone around Hubs doesn’t just mean that local client apps and cloud apps are grouped next to each other; it means that the local client and cloud work together.

Microsoft tried to explicitly build a social-networking phone featuring Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace with the Kin. The Kin failed and was killed by Microsoft mostly because it wasn’t a full-featured smartphone (it was a fork of Windows Phone 7), but required a smartphone’s data plan.

The Kin’s cloud-backed social and sharing components lived on in Windows Phone 7. They were always there. Only now, Flickr and MySpace are nowhere to be found.

Even before the Bing announcement, Facebook was a conspicuous part of the WP7 presentation. Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore outlined a scenario where users could take a photo on their phone that’s then uploaded to Facebook automatically, without even opening the Facebook app.

In the press release for WP7, Microsoft notes that “the customizable Start screen with Live Tiles provides real-time updates so you can keep tabs on the latest weather forecast, your favorite band, a friends Facebook page and more, all with just one glimpse” (emphasis added).

That wasn’t an accident. The Facebook-Bing partnership was already happening.

It’s the exact strategy that Zuckerberg outlined in his interview with Michael Arrington, where he explained why Facebook wasn’t building its own phone.

Zuckerberg only makes an offhand reference to WP7 in that interview: “If Windows Phone 7 takes off, then Im sure well put resources on that.” But he added, with reference to their efforts with the iPhone and Android, “the question is what could we do if we also started hacking at a deeper level, and that is a lot of the stuff that were thinking about.”

In order to do that, Zuckerberg explained, you need to find a company that was willing to incorporate social networking from the operating system up — not adding a layer on top of what they were doing, but making that the focus of the device and its services.

At least one of those companies is Microsoft.

We started thinking what would social search look like, and we started looking around for partners, Zuckerberg said. Microsoft really is the underdog here and they really are incentivized to try new things.

He was talking about search, but he may as well have been talking about phones.

Microsoft may be the underdog in search and phones, but they’ve actually been ahead of the curve in terms of incorporating social layers into their products. The Zune had song and photo sharing between devices over Wi-Fi before the iPhone was even announced.

But that was a closed network, limited to just Zune-to-Zune, and later Zune-to-Xbox. In order to get outside of itself, Microsoft partnered with Facebook early on — it still owns part of the company — and Facebook helped shape Microsoft’s social strategy.

Microsoft has been quietly building a social network without anyone actually noticing. Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live are all social networks where users work, share files and talk about media together. You use the same identity across all of those services on every Microsoft device.

Facebook is already embedded in all of them: it’s built into Messenger, Hotmail and Outlook; it’s what powers part of the social dimension of Xbox Live. And Bing is already embedded in Facebook, in the form of maps and search results.

Now Facebook’s information is embedded in Bing search. And search is one of just three buttons on every WP7 phone.

Consequently, Facebook’s partnership with Bing isn’t just about Google; it isn’t just about “like” results showing up when you search in a web browser on your PC.

It’s about incorporating a social layer into media on every device in your household, from your phone to your set-top box. It’s about making those devices smarter in how they communicate with each other and from one platform to another.

That’s what stood out to me most at the Windows Phone 7 launch event. The Office people demonstrated how to use Windows Live to stream a PowerPoint presentation from a Windows PC to a Mac. The Xbox people were showing how to chat about a Netflix movie with your Facebook friends on Xbox live. The hardware people were showing off a wide-angle HD webcam to let families chat with families from their living rooms. Deep integration of devices, media and services, using the cloud to power person-to-person interaction, through voice, images and text.

If we think about Apple’s attempt with Ping to bring a social layer to iTunes (which has been criticized, in part, because Apple didn’t partner up with Facebook), Sony’s idea of a multitasking television set or Twitter’s plays to get on the television screen with Google TV, it’s clear that that’s where we’re heading.

The only places where Microsoft and Facebook are “underdogs” are search and smartphones. When it comes to social networking and smart partnering with other companies — including each other — the two giants are way ahead of the field.

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Playstation 3 just leapfrogged Xbox 360 and snagged the best Netflix experience on a video game console yet. The new Netflix application for PS3, rolling out for download Monday, will let Netflix subscribers with PS3s watch movies and TV without a disc; some titles will even stream in 1080i HD and 5.1 digital surround sound.

Netflix Watch Instantly streaming video has been available for PS3 since late last year, but required a Blu-ray instant streaming disc in order to access the service. By running as a native PS3 app, users won’t need to change discs to watch a movie. Netflix also has a new user interface, optimized for the PS3 controller’s analog joysticks.

In the new UI, search especially seems smartly designed for the PS3 controller, using an alphabetical grid and intelligent auto-complete to minimize the pain of text entry (see the still below):

Still from Sony PS3 Promotional Video.

I even like the way the controller buttons control common text entry commands in-context, like space, delete, and enter. There are keyboards available for PS3, but being able to use the controller well is a real asset.

Netflix has not only continued to bring its streaming service to seemingly every device with a screen, but to make that service better. Still, among consoles, the announced PS3 app stands out: Xbox users don’t have 1080i or surround sound, and Wii users have only now added search to their service, which still requires an “Instant Streaming” disc. Adding media services has become part of the continued rivalry between Xbox and PS3, along with new motion-capture interaction devices like Playstation’s Move controller and Xbox’s Kinect.

Besides video game consoles, Netflix can now stream to personal computers on Windows and Mac; TiVo, HD, Roku, Logitech and Apple TV boxes; Windows Phone 7 and all iOS devices; and a wide array of net-connected TVs and Blu-Ray players, including those using Google TV. Roku’s players, which began as Netflix-only boxes, will soon be available in retail stores through a partnership with Netgear.

Netflix on PS3: Disc-free Next Week [Playstation Blog]

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One of the major advantages of Windows Phone 7 is its tight integration with Microsoft’s other devices and software. In a terse statement, Microsoft let Mac users know they can eventually expect a light version: “Later in 2010 Microsoft will make a public beta available of a tool that allows Windows Phone 7 to sync select content with Mac computers.”

The “tool” will probably be a version of the Zune desktop software, if a Microsoft UK marketing head early tweet is any indication: “ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m glad to confirm that Mac users would be able to use Zune on their Macs to sync with #WP7… More details soon.”

This makes sense for Microsoft: not only have they always made software for Macs (notably Office), you’d never want to put too many limitations on what PCs you can use with a post-PC handheld. Imagine if Apple had kept the iPod and iTunes Mac-only. Or if the Zune had never included support for Macs. (Wait, that second one actually happened.)

But why would a Mac user want to use a WP7 phone — particularly when the iPhone works so well with a Mac? Basically, it’s the same reason a Mac user might pick an Android phone over an iPhone. Either you like the physical phone better, or (more often) you’re more tied into Google’s or Microsoft’s software than you are to Apple’s.

Here are some scenarios where that might be true.

1. You’re a heavy user of Microsoft Office. Windows Phone 7 has the full Office suite built-in. iPhone’s Office offerings aren’t as strong; it’s a little better for iPad, but not that much.
   
   Windows Office 2011 for Mac is coming at the end of the month, and it’s the best, most-interoperable Office suite available for the Mac. It’s also finally bringing a real Outlook application, not the baby Outlook they called Entourage. (Entourage the application provided the exact opposite experience of the TV show Entourage.) By default, iPhone on the Mac syncs with iCal, Address Book, and Mail; a phone that synced with Outlook could be a huge upgrade.

   This is where the lack of OneNote on Office 2011 for Mac really bothers me; it’s WP7’s Office showpiece, very smartly implemented on the handset and nearly completely useless to Office users on Macs.

2. You’re also a heavy user of Windows Live. Android users love their experience with Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Some of my friends who don’t love Windows love Windows Live, preferring it over Google’s cloud apps and Apple’s MobileMe. Office 2011 and WP7 are both extremely well-integrated with Windows Live. iPhone and Android aren’t.
3. You’re a gamer who loves Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. Apple may have a set-top box, but it doesn’t play games. The iPhone offers a lot of good casual games for handheld, but WP7 will too. If you have a Google TV, it’ll be better with your Android phone; if you have an Xbox 360, it’ll be better with a WP7 phone.
   
   The whole industry is moving towards greater interoperability between computers, handhelds and set-top boxes. The Xbox – WP7 combo will be one of the most versatile handheld-to-boxtop media combinations available. Add a Mac to the mix, rig it to stream content to your Xbox and that’s a pretty powerful power trio. Particularly if you don’t care about buying movies and renting TV shows through iTunes, which is the only advantage an Apple TV would offer.

In the tech world, Mac users are stereotyped as Apple evangelists and/or fanboys, people who’ve bought into the ecosystem from top to bottom. But think about your average student with a MacBook, or your parents you convinced to buy an iMac. They are usually agnostic about this stuff.

Most Mac users probably don’t think long and hard about Apple’s long-term peripheral strategy, or whether Android’s lack of hardware standards will cause them problems down the line. They use Office on their Macs, use PCs at work, play Xbox in their living room and want to buy the phone they like on the carrier they use for a price they can afford. They bought their Macs for the same reason.

The last piece of this puzzle is really how well Windows Phone 7 and the Mac will be able to talk to each other. History bears this out: for a long time, Blackberry desktop software on PC was fantastic, but the version for the Mac wasn’t anywhere close. In my case, it eventually drove me away from the Blackberry and towards the iPhone.

If Microsoft decides that it doesn’t really need to give Mac users anything more than the bare minimum, or that they can capture more value by trying to pull WP7 buyers to the PC platform, then it won’t work. They’ll keep their current customers and add value within their existing ecosystem.

But if Microsoft begins to see their world as one that doesn’t have to be centered around the PC, where they can make great software and compelling experiences for all platforms, and shift more of their institutional weight towards the cloud and the living room, then even Mac users might have to take a long hard look at those new phones.

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As we’ve seen with the success of iOS and Android (and the disappointments of Palm’s WebOS), applications are essential to the success of smartphone platforms. Customers and developers both want to know what the new Windows Phone 7 will bring to the table.

At the WP7 announcement, Microsoft’s spokespeople were coy about the total number of third-party applications that would be available for the new OS at launch. Instead they touted their own admittedly-impressive integrated applications, including MS Office, Zune for media management, XBox Live for gaming and Bing for search and maps.

Microsoft also spotlighted a few key partners, including AT&T’s U-Verse TV & Video, and cloud service applications from eBay, iMDB, Fandango and Slacker Radio. Major social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, too, are well-integrated into the OS and its applications. It also announced that Electronic Arts would bring The Sims 3 and other games to WP7. Other applications including Netflix and Flixster have already been presented in demos.

When asked directly about the number of apps on the store at launch, an unnamed Microsoft spokesman told Gizmodo, “It’ll be more than iPad at launch. More than the iPhone. “What matters isn’t how many apps we have, it’s that you can find the apps you need.” Of course, the iPhone had zero third-party apps at launch; the iPad about 350. Most rumors have put the total number of apps somewhere in the thousands.

The marketplace for third-party applications is already in place on the new phones. Our Charlie Sorrel reported last week that life-altering music streaming service Spotify will be in the marketplace, at least in parts of Europe where the service is legally available. TeleRead’s Paul Biba reports that e-reading app Wattpad will be ready to go at launch too.

Still, whatever the number, it won’t approach Apple’s 250,000 applications for iOS or Google’s 90,000 for Android. Nor will they have close to as many handsets (or tablets) in the market. Just how quickly can Microsoft rally third-party developers to catch up with Apple or Google?

While Microsoft can’t offer the same number of users right away, developing for WP7 could offer some advantages. Unlike Android, the hardware specs for WP7 phones are more-or-less standard. And while Apple has been criticized for their opaque approval process, Microsoft has promised explicit standards, quick processing and specific feedback to developers whose apps are rejected.

The development tools for WP7 are also well-established. The primary environment for apps will be Silverlight. In March, Windows offered a package of development tools for WP7, including an add-in and express version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, XNA Game Studio 4.0, Expression Blend (a tool for user interface development in Silverlight) and a phone emulator for application testing.

It’s not only new developers and those coming from other mobile platforms who will be picking these up. Part of the struggle current Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 developers will face is that they will have to port or rewrite their existing applications to work on the new OS. Even though developers may grumble, and it may take longer for their apps to be ready, it’s still a substantial base to draw upon.

There’s an opportunity, too, for developers (particularly for media and gaming applications) to gain access not just to Windows Phone 7 users, but to XBox Live and other platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem. With Windows Phone, Microsoft is aiming for integration of its product line; if it’s successful, integrated cross-platform applications will be an essential part of that.

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We hate our remotes. Every electronic media device comes with its own remote. We lose them and can’t control our stuff without them. They break. We confuse them with each other. It’s too hard to do simple things. It’s way too hard to do hard things. We ask too much of them. The batteries die, and they all take different batteries. They’re uncomfortable. They’re unresponsive. What we do with our hands don’t match what’s happening on the screen. And the software on the devices themselves that’s controlled by the remote is frequently terrible.

And occasionally, as with Sony’s controller for its upcoming Google TV, the remotes just boggle the mind with their ugliness and complexity.

We’re not alone in disliking remotes. The above litany of problems comes from what readers told Consumer Reports in an article titled simply “Readers Dislike TV Remotes.”

Now we have an emerging class of internet-connected media devices with powerful software designed to make navigating TVs and movies easier. Google TV, Apple TV, TiVo and Roku join game consoles like Sony’s Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii in providing multimedia content on the biggest screens in our house.

But however sophisticated the software, all of these devices still need a hardware device for us to control them. It’s quite likely that some of these devices won’t be dedicated remotes at all, but phones, tablets or other handheld media devices running apps. We might use these apps to control not just our TVs, but our entire house.

That’s one vision of the future of remote control.

Here, we want to examine the other side of the equation: dedicated hardware controllers. From traditional remotes to mini-keyboards, video controllers and devices that combine all three, here are fifteen devices that offer you a glimpse of everything that’s good and bad about the current generation of remote controls.

Above: Sony’s Google TV Controller

Wired: Sony’s controller offers all of the control you could want. Full QWERTY keyboard for text entry, which is essential for search — sure to be a key part of the Google experience. Raised buttons with different feel make it easier to use in the dark. It’s even got tab, control, number, and function keys — not dependent on software to get it done.

Tired: The sheer size of the thing will be a deal-breaker for some. In different shades of gray, it doesn’t look like a device from 2010. Too many buttons could be confusing or intimidating to non-expert users.

Image by ABC News

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Source:wired.com

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It’s easy to dismiss Xbox’s new Kinect controller-free sensor as a “Wii Too” product.

But I wonder whether Microsoft is onto something much bigger, something that will take the innovations introduced for the Xbox into the broader sphere of personal computing.

Sure, from the perspective of gaming in 2010, it doesn’t offer much that Nintendo’s Wii doesn’t already have — as we pointed out in our review of Kinect in June.

But for one thing, Kinect doesn’t just record your movements. Its system of cameras, microphones, sensors and software algorithms also records (and recognizes) your voice, and can recognize faces and objects. For another, it didn’t come directly from the gaming and entertainment division at Microsoft, trying to copy the Wii. It grew out of Microsoft’s research labs, from a combination of teams already working on alternative input systems for computing devices. Gaming is a high-profile test case for their implementation.

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Thursday that Kinect “portends a revolution in the way people will interact with computers.” Bill Gates suggested something very similar at the D5 conference in 2007: The real transformation of the desktop metaphor for the PC would come through innovations in three-dimensional imaging. PCs and games were both held back by their reliance on the mouse/keyboard and the controller, Gates said:

[The Wiimote is] a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing whats going on. And, you know, in the meetings, like youre on a video conference, you dont know whos speaking, you know, theyre audio only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design it in a way that peoples expectations about privacy are handled appropriately, but software can do vision and it can do it very, very inexpensively. And that means this stuff becomes pervasive. You dont just talk about it being in a laptop device. You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room.

For a useful analogy and some historical perspective, let’s go back to October 2001. On October 25, Microsoft released Windows XP, still the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Two days earlier, Apple introduced the iPod, the most successful digital music and media player ever. Over the next nine years, what happened?

One of Apple’s shrewdest moves in the past decade was to embrace the iPod as the technological and commercial driver of its core businesses. The iPod was universally hailed as the top device in its class, technologically sophisticated and culturally cool. iTunes gave Apple footholds in retail (first for music, then other media) and on the PC platform. It was the first post-PC device that along with digital cameras and video, let Apple remake the personal computer from a workstation into a digital media hub by way of iLife. Then, in rapid succession, the iPod begat the iPhone, Apple TV, and the iPad. Apple brought multitouch interfaces to its laptops, and now its desktops via the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. It’s a huge, diversified company, but it all springs from the success of the iPod.

Over the same period, Microsoft lost a lot of its reputation as an innovator, especially in the retail market. It settled its antitrust case with the DOJ. Its web browser and new Windows OS were widely reviled. It tried (and largely failed) to get strong positions in search, smartphones, and music players.

But the Xbox is different. Critics and fans love it; it has sold (and continually grown) like gangbusters; it’s been widely perceived as both serious and cool; it’s had landmark games like Halo, BioShock, and Final Fantasy XIII; and with XBox Live it arguably did more than any other product to actually bring proper networked computing into people’s living rooms.

Apple’s iPod, and then the iPhone, have given the company a direction for the future: innovative cloud and boutique retail, selling handheld computing devices driven by multi-touch interfaces. It’s a very different path than if Apple had continued to follow the roadmap offered by the Mac.

If Microsoft follows the Xbox rather than Windows and Office, or rather than chasing after Apple in tablets or Google in search, we’ll see it become a company less defined by enterprise solutions and spreadsheets than by ubiquitous, large-scale, multi-surface household computing.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The one thing we didn’t know (officially at least) about Microsoft’s controller-free Kinect sensor was the price. Now it has been added to the official Microsoft Store, coming in at the expected $150.

The Kinect is a bar that plugs into an Xbox 360 and sits atop your TV, just like the Wii’s bar, and allows you to interact with games using your own movement. The difference is that the Kinect has a pair of cameras – one for depth and one for motion – that figure out where you and your body parts are at all time. There are also four microphones to listen to your voice, but no controller to hold in your hand.

The accuracy is, according to those who have tested it, startling. The Kinect can see where your hands, feet and face are, and is even fine-grained enough to recognize when you’re not achieving the right pose in yoga, for example, and offers instructions to correct it, just like a real teacher.

Technically, it seems rather sparse: the two contained in the bar run at just 640 x 480 resolution at 30fps, and microphones in this case are likely just basic. The magic would appear to be in the software which so impressed us with the force-controlling, Light Saber-wielding Star Wars game demoed at E3.

The Kinect is only available for pre-order. You’ll still have to wait until November 4th to get one.

Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360 [Microsoft]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews