Indian Engineers Modify Kinect To Help the Blind Walk With Confidence

New submitter albinobee writes "The Kinect for Xbox 360 isn't only about gaming; it can also be used to help compensate for impaired vision, as a team of Indian engineers is working to prove. A device called viSparsh, still in its nascent stage, is a motion sensing belt that can help alert the blind to obstacles that lie in their path."

Indoor use only...

[Anonymous Coward]

beings that the Kinect uses unmodulated IR, sunlight will completely wash out the dim IR coming from the Kinect.

ACs usually cannot afford Microsoft *any* credit

[benjymouse]

Project Natal was developed at Microsoft Research Cambridg: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microsoft-project-natal [scientificamerican.com]

Microsoft used an Israeli company to develop the actual product hardware. This may be the reason why someone could think that MS just "bought" the entire product. Or it could be an opportunity for ./ MS haters to create a myth that MS cannot innovate.

But this was a MSR project all along.

Re:Dork

[Jyms]

They bought it from a company called 3DV Systems. It was then called the ZCam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZCam).