Microsoft Research Brings Kinect-Style Depth Perception to Ordinary Cameras 31
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes "Microsoft has been working on ways to make any regular 2D camera capture depth, meaning it could do some of the same things a Kinect does. As you can see in the video below the team managed to pull this off and we might see this tech all around in the near future. What's really impressive is that this works with many types of cameras. The research team used a smartphone as well as a regular webcam and both managed to achieve some impressive results, the cameras have to be slightly modified but that's only to permit more IR light to hit the sensor." The video is impressive, but note that so are several of the other projects that Microsoft has created for this year's SIGGRAPH, in particular one that makes first-person sports-cam footage more watchable.
Re:As predicted in Better Off Ted (Score:2, Interesting)
That itself is probably based on the fact that there are biometric systems that do have issues with certain racial types. Iris scanners are one example, as the extra melatonin means there's too little contrast to pick up enough detail to be as reliable without tuning for that type of iris. That's been known since way before 2009.