Indian Engineers Modify Kinect To Help the Blind Walk With Confidence 59
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."
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Well here is one.
"WTF dad, why did you come to this forsaken country, India again rejected my H1B application"
Seems rediculous but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I hear about Kinect the more it makes it seem like one of the more revolutionary products that Microsoft has ever come out with...
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ACs usually cannot afford Microsoft *any* credit (Score:4, Informative)
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:Seems rediculous but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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And that was Kinect's main advantage. Wiimote, Move, they use special controllers and your games are limited to that.
Microsoft is proving that you can combine Kinect AND controllers. Some games use Kinect's microphone array for voice commands (which does noise and audio cancellation to enable long-range voice reco
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It turned out to be mostly a stupid gimmick, or at best an answer to a question no one asked.
When I heard about the kinect, I thought "Great, another stupid, pointless product no one will use."
Maybe I should buy stock in whatever company makes these [thinkgeek.com].
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What has really made it so revolutionary is Microsoft's open nature about it.
Lol, Except for the bit where they stated they were never going to release a driver, that using it with a PC voided the warranty, and that use for any other purpose was illegal, and threatened anyone who started making a driver.
Fortunately, one of the guys they hired to develop(johnny lee) offered 3k of his own money through a front for the first person to release open drivers for it.
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The technology was developed by PrimeSense. Microsoft's gaming unit brought it into Microsoft. As I understand it, Primesense was initially aiming to make it part of every television as a remote control device. No longer will you lose the remote behind the couch cushions. The robotics community jumped on the Kinect right away, since high resolution distance measurement of the robot's environment is a long standing problem. Out of the box, though, I think the Kinect in its current form has trouble in out
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Unless of course it will be done in the US in dangerous sweatshops...
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Congratulations! (Score:2)
Now if they could only open the eyes... (Score:1)
of Microsoft execs and get them to forget about Windows Phones.
Indoor use only... (Score:2, Informative)
beings that the Kinect uses unmodulated IR, sunlight will completely wash out the dim IR coming from the Kinect.
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beings that the Kinect uses unmodulated IR, sunlight will completely wash out the dim IR coming from the Kinect.
Something to think about .. particularly in areas where mean temperatures tend to be high, so there will be a considerably amount of daytime IR.
I have one of those cute little office helicopters, with an IR controller. Works pretty badly out of doors in direct sunlight, though pretty good on overcast days, morning and dusk.
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Your helicopter uses modulated IR. The transmitter probably runs at 40kHz (like a tv remote) with an appropriate filter on the receiver side.
Ob citation (Score:2)
Indeed. While they have improved the camera, the IR seem about the same.
http://support.xbox.com/en-GB/kinect/setup-and-playspace/lighting [xbox.com]
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/01/microsoft-bets-big-on-kinect-for-windows-but-splits-its-community.ars [arstechnica.com]
When it crashes, so do they ;-) (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't think there would have been any complaints if the story read "a team of German engineers have...".
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Why stop there (Score:2)
I like what you did there but surely you can't be satisfied with "Engineers modify Kinect to help the blind walk with confidence"? First of all, there is a lot of redundancy over there! In the context, it's obvious that people are "engineering" something so specifying "engineers" is redundant. We could substitute it with "People" but it's also obvious that people are doing the modification, so we arrive at "Kinect modified to help the blind walk with confidence".
Now that we're done with the redundancy, we
Re:Indian? (Score:4, Insightful)
Engineers? (Score:4, Funny)
Why is this post about engineers, when they are just people?
Useful for finding objects, or finding gaps (Score:1)
There was an ultrasound torch developed 20-30 years ago, for helping blind people navigate. It was designed to help people find objects, and give different sounds for different objects (tree, hard wall etc.). It wasn't successful, but some people did use it. They spoke to the blind people who did use it, and found that they were using it to find gaps, not to find objects. The design might have been different if it had been optimised for finding gaps.
39 second mark (Score:2)
Limited usability (Score:1)
These are already in wide use (Score:1)
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Horses and buggies were also better and more reliable than the earliest automobiles. I understand the point you're making. High tech isn't a solution for everything, but stuff like this is worth a shot at the R&D stage. You're never really sure that you can't improve a technology until you give it a try.
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