NEWS - Tuesday, May 21, 2013
No use hiding, Xbox One Kinect can see in the dark
Ooh, what a fancy new sensor the Xbox Ones Kinect has. With a 1080p camera and some nonsense about photons, its more accurate and more reliable. And it knows when youre afraid. With the big reveal today, Microsoft has demonstrated using Kinect on Xbox One to detect users heart rate and facial expressions.
Microsoft showed Wired these fancy features and more in a demo of the new sensor.
MS didnt go into details, but one imagines that it detect heartbeats with the technique of amplifying images to exaggerate changes in your skin tone as blood rushes around.
The demos a little shaky, though. Kinect seemed confident the hosts heartrate stayed at 60bpm throughout the entire demonstration, so its either a little imprecise or a fantastic tool for detecting robots clad in synthflesh. Or not quite ready yet. Who could say?
Its a feature obviously useful in exercise software, but imagine the possibilities of games reacting to your emotional state, playing you like a puppet and watching you dance. Valve Software has been pretty interested in that sort of biometric data for some time too.
This could dovetail nicely with another Kinect feature demoed to Wired, detecting facial expressions. By scrutinising your face, software can detect what sort of face youre pulling--happy, neutral, and so on--as well as whether youre "engaged," if youre looking away, if your eyes or mouth are open, and so on. Again, this is a bit wonky right now, but fiendish developers could use it to pull some clever tricks.
Video courtesy of Wired
Source: http://www.shacknews.com