And all the jury-rigged foot pads and nunchuks strapped to thighs can't capture whole-body running or dancing like Kinect can. That's where the Xbox's processor comes in: translating the movements captured by the Kinect camera into meaningful on-screen events. These are context-specific. If a river-rafting game requires jumping and leaning, it's going to look for jumping and leaning.
If navigating a Netflix "Watch Instantly" menu requires horizontal and vertical hand-waving, that's what will register on the screen. It has an easier time recognizing some gestures and postures than others. As Kotaku noted this summer , recognizing human movement -- at least, any movement more subtle than a hand-wave -- is easier to do when someone is standing up with all of their joints articulated than sitting down.
So you can move your arms to navigate menus, watch TV and movies, or browse the internet. You can't sit on the couch wiggling your thumbs and pretending you're playing Street Fighter II. It's not a magic trick cooked up by MI Kinect also has a stereo microphone to enable chat and voice commands.
The tech on the audio capture is fairly well-known, but it's worth observing that unlike the noise-canceling microphone you might have on your smartphone or laptop's webcam, Kinect has a wide-field, conic audio capture. Until recently, computers had more trouble making such judgments. Audio information from a number of microphones does provide considerable information about the distance and direction of the audio source, but determining this information is difficult for programs to do.
Similarly, a video picture provides an image of the environment for the computer to analyze, but a computer has to work very hard to extract information about the objects in pictures or video because an image shows a flat, two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world. Kinect changes all this. The Kinect sensor bar contains two cameras, a special infrared light source, and four microphones.
It also contains a stack of signal processing hardware that is able to make sense of all the data that the cameras, infrared light, and microphones can generate. By combining the output from these sensors, a program can track and recognize objects in front of it, determine the direction of sound signals, and isolate them from background noise. To get an idea of how the Kinect sensor works, you could take one apart and look inside. Figure A Kinect sensor.
Figure shows a Kinect with the cover removed. You can see the two cameras in the middle and the special light source on the left. The four microphones are arranged along the bottom of the sensor bar. Figure A Kinect sensor unwrapped. Figure shows all the hardware inside the Kinect that makes sense of the information being supplied from all the various devices. Figure The Kinect sensor data processing hardware. To make everything fit into the slim bar form, the designers had to stack the circuit boards on top of each other.
Some of these components produce quite a bit of heat, so a tiny fan that can be seen on the far right of Figure sucks air along the circuits to keep them cool. The base contains an electric motor and gear assembly that lets the Kinect adjust its angle of view vertically. Newer Xbox s have a Kinect port from which the device can draw power, but the Kinect sensor comes with a power supply at no additional charge for users of older Xbox models. For a video game to use the features of the hardware, it must also use the proprietary layer of Kinect software that enables body and voice recognition from the Kinect sensor [source: Rule ].
A further look at the technical specifications for Kinect reveal that both the video and depth sensor cameras have a x pixel resolution and run at 30 FPS frames per second. The specifications also suggest that you should allow about 6 feet 1. The Kinect hardware, though, would be nothing without the breakthrough software that makes use of the data it gathers. Leap forward to the next page to read about the "brain" behind the camera lens.
Be careful not to drop the sensor. Give the Kinect sensor breathing room. Like your console, the Kinect sensor needs room for the vents and fans to maintain an optimal operating temperature. Keep the area around your sensor free from clutter, and don't cover the vents. Calibrate the Kinect sensor microphone. The microphone on your Kinect sensor needs to be calibrated so that it can hear you above the ambient background noise in your play space. Before you start, turn up the volume on your TV so that it's above the level you normally use to watch movies and shows.
At the same time, make sure that your room is quiet. Now start the calibration process:. Make sure that Kinect is set to Kinect on. Under Troubleshooting , select Kinect doesn't hear me.
Select Start audio check.
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