RoomAlive

English: The Xbox console with the S controller, made by Microsoft. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can see this having major educational uses. But it still feels version 1.0 with a long way to go. This will make new kinds of games possible. This will also get used by the porn industry. This could be used to create exotic backgrounds for parties you might want to throw.

Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game

Relive’s video projectors and Kinect combination is far too costly and large for living rooms right now, but Microsoft is imagining a future where this technology will be smaller and low-cost...... "There’s still lots to explore with RoomAlive as a gaming platform," explain’s a Microsoft Research spokesperson. "We envision a future where games can use physical objects as part of the game."

RoomAlive: Magical Experiences Enabled by Scalable, Adaptive Projector Camera Units

Users can touch, shoot, stomp, dodge and steer projected content that seamlessly co-exists with their existing physical environment. ..... focuses on interaction, and the new kinds of games that we can create with interactive projection mapping. RoomAlive looks farther into the future of projection mapping, and asks what new experiences will we have in the next few years? ...... The projector is used for display and the Kinect is used for tracking. Normally video projectors are used to display PowerPoint presentations on flat screens. RoomAlive uses cheap commodity video projectors to animate every square inch of your living room, this technique is known as projection mapping.

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NUI: Natural User Interface

English: The Microsoft Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The NUI will be a bigger departure than the GUI, Graphical User Interface, was. This is a big one. Microsoft has some advantages here. But it will not be any one company thing. This will be a tectonic shift.

Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon

Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year ...... Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft’s Skype unit, the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks, and the 3-D design company Autodesk ....... a startup called Volumental, lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement—something that could help with online shopping. ..... data from a tablet’s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games, where a virtual character viewed on a device’s screen integrates into the real environment. In one demo, a flying robot appeared on-screen and selected a landing spot on top of a box on a cluttered table. As the tablet showing the character was moved, it stayed perched on the tabletop, and even disappeared behind occluding objects. ...... the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop, or take control of some features of Windows. ...... reminiscent of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console, which introduced gamers to depth sensing and gesture control in 2010. Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCs in 2012, and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013, but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet.

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Touch Is Transient

Gesture will go mainstream before we know it.

A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen
Leaping Into the Gesture-Control Era

a matchbox-sized device that adds intuitive gesture control to any computer ..... The technology, which is also being adapted for mobile devices, could even leave the beloved pocket touch screen looking outmoded. .... The black glass on the Leap’s upper side hides two small cameras and a handful of infrared LEDs, which track the motion of a person’s fingers to an accuracy of a hundredth of a millimeter .... Leap provides the solution to “gorilla arm,” a term used to describe the dubious ergonomics of a person repeatedly lifting his or her hands from the keyboard or mouse and reaching out to operate a computer’s touch screen. Users of Leap’s device can lift their hands just slightly off the keyboard and make more economic gestures with their fingers. .... significantly faster than using a mouse and keyboard .... Holz says touch screens soared in popularity because they are more intuitive to use than keyboards and mice, but believes they are limited in a way the Leap is not. “The fact is that you can’t really do anything with a tablet, with tap and swipe, but it feels natural,” he says, meaning that people love touch screens but can’t easily create content using them. “We have that same natural experience but we have more power.” ..... since the [developer’s kit] is still in the preview stage, more features are being added that make capturing specific motions even easier. ..... over the longer term, the Leap will be used for very complex interactions. “You’ll be reaching into a 3-D world and grabbing hold of and moving things.” .... a chunk of simulated clay. He reached out and pushed and pulled with his fingers in the air in front of the monitor, creating a stylized human head in about a minute. ...... gestures can help remove a barrier between people and their technology ..... Leap Motion’s closest competitor may be Kinect, Microsoft’s body-tracking sensor for the Xbox games console

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GUI To Touch To Gesture

Steve Jobs took the lead on touch and Microsoft is playing catch up. Steve Jobs stole the Graphical User Interface - a big jump from what existed before - from Xerox, and Bill Gates stole it from Jobs. But it was Gates that won the PC wars.

But there is something beyond touch. That is gesture. And there Microsoft seems to be ahead. Gesture promises to be even more intuitive than touch. It is exciting what they might do.

Point and click feels one dimensional. Touch feels two dimensional. Gesture feels three dimensional. It is a paradigm shift.

Microsoft's Plan to Bring About the Era of Gesture Control

The company wants to make it as common to wave your arms at or speak to a computer as it is to reach for a mouse or touch screen today. ..... "We're trying to encourage [software] developers to create a whole new class of app controlled by gesture and voice," says Peter Zatloukal, head of engineering for the Kinect for Windows program. ...... "We initially used keyboards, then the mouse and GUIs were a big innovation, now touch is a big part of people's lives," he says. "The progression will now be to voice and gesture." ... A conventional keyboard, mouse, or touch screen can be difficult to use in classrooms and hospital wards, or on factory floors. ..... Microsoft needs software developers to create killer applications. Along with the hardware, the company provides a software developer's kit, or SDK, that offers a range of ready-made tools, including voice recognition and body-part tracking .... by using infrared, your apps can see in the dark now ..... Nissan has introduced a gesture-controlled system for dealerships that lets prospective buyers look inside a virtual version of a new car. ...... It even trumps voice recognition, he says. "Voice recognition is 95 to 98 percent accurate, so one time in 50 it won't work," he says. "This works like a tool—it will work for you every time." ...... "When using a computer today, we think of our bodies as a fingertip or at most two fingertips," he says. But humans evolved to communicate with their whole bodies. .... detecting fidgeting or defensive body language such as folded arms. The hope is to address the social cues that are lost when video calls replace face-to-face communication

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Leap Motion

English: 6 degrees of freedom (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Big Data could save Yahoo. Gestures could save Microsoft. But startups stand strong chances in those spaces.

The Most Important New Technology Since the Smart Phone Arrives December 2012

Leap Motion, a small, $70 gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works ..... Unlike a touchscreen interface, with the Leap, there's no friction. That sounds trivial, but it isn't. It's the difference between attempting to conduct a symphony with a wand and attempting to conduct the same symphony by sketching out what the orchestra should do next via chalk on a blackboard. ..... Leap operates in three dimensions rather than two. Forget pinch-to-zoom; imagine "push to scroll," rotating your flattened hand to control the orientation of an object with a full six degrees of freedom, or using both hands at once to control either end of a bezier surface you're casually sculpting as part of an object you'll be sending to your 3D printer. .... the Leap can see almost any combination of objects - a pen, your fingers, all 10 fingers at once

This is a leap from 2D to 3D.

One question though, if it picks up gestures well, would you not need to be trained to use it? What if you end up making unwanted gestures? Not everyone can conduct a symphony, you know.

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