Bounty - Kinect drivers for Sage

[wayner]

I am in for $30, anyone else? It would be very cool to control Sage by just waving your hand in the air.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by wayner

I am in for $30, anyone else? It would be very cool to control Sage by just waving your hand in the air.

I remember reading someone offering a $2k bounty for an open-source USB driver to use kinect on a PC.

[PLUCKYHD]

Sage really isn't touch screen friendly let alone kinect friendly.

I like the concept but moviing arms to fast foward and stop and such is just asking for guest to mess with me.

[QueOnda]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

Sage really isn't touch screen friendly let alone kinect friendly.

I like the concept but moviing arms to fast foward and stop and such is just asking for guest to mess with me.

Especially when your watching sports.

[JetreL]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

I remember reading someone offering a $2k bounty for an open-source USB driver to use kinect on a PC.

Yeah that was Adafruit industries. She is an EE designer that sells a good bit of solder kits for specialty clocks, etc. There is some pretty nifty stuff on her site. Here a link to the Slashdot story about the bounty.

Slashdot.org

[paulbeers]

The last thing I would want, is for Sage to start fast forwarding because I got up and went to the bathroom and it misinterpreted my movement.. The other major issue is with Kinect alone. It can't decipher extremely fine movements, so you would only be able to map about a handful of commands to movements (since they have to be fairly large movements). I think Kinect looks cool, but to be truly useful in gaming, they will have to have some kind of controller to do the finer movements (i.e. pretty much making it like wii and ps3 the only difference is using a camera).

[wayner]

I have used Sage with a touch screen before and it worked pretty well - there was a plugin that facilitated the process as well - it may have just been for SageMC since I have pretty much always used SageMC as my UI. However that plugin stopped working somewhere along the line in V6.

To select controls with the Kinect you wave your arm to get its attention and then you hold your hand over a control for a few seconds so it is unlikely that you would do so by mistake. The way that I would see it working is that you would wave your arms which would be kind of like clicking the mouse in Sage where it brings up the controls and timeline. You would then hover your hand over the control that you want to activate. In menus you would move your hand up or down to select items.

Note that you cannot currently use Kinect to control very much on the Xbox360 once you are outside of the specific Kinect games. For example, you cannot use the Kinect o control the Win Media Center Extender functionality in Kinect, nor can you use it for the Xbox Dashboard except for one small Kinect specific portion of the Dashboard.

[paulbeers]

I fail to see how this form of control is better than just using a remote control though. Has a cool factor, but I see it as something I would use twice and then stop. More expensive, and potentially less accurate trying to control where the "cursor" stops. Besides, it wouldn't be useful on extenders so for me it is completely pointless/useless....

[Brent]

Meh. I'm not that excited about the concept. It would be cool, but would I use it? Doubtful.

[wayner]

While the utility of this functionality would not be that big in the short term I could see this really being the future given additional improvements in the technology. You would just use finger to swipe up or down, point at something to select, etc.

Right now the geek factor is what I am going for, plus you never have to worry about losing your remote.

[Lester Jacobs]

The one useful feature of Kinect that could be applied to SageTV would be the facial/body recognition portion of the functionality. One could assign permissions to shows or associate groups of shows to particular people. Thus if I sit down in front of the TV I would see only those shows I interested in. Similarly, if one of my kids is in front of the TV then only those shows which they have access to (i.e. no adult content, inappropriate language, etc) would be shown. Great way to control to Sage experience without forcing everyone to login/logout since this would happen automatically via the Kinect recognition engine.

Cheers
Lester

[mikejaner]

http://hackaday.com/2010/11/10/kinec...o-and-hacking/

[gplasky]

Open Source Kinect Driver

Gerry

[GKusnick]

Years ago I bought a gyro mouse that I could wave around in the air to control the living room PC. The novelty wore off real fast and I quickly went back to using a remote. It turns out that consistently pointing to the right place in mid-air is much harder than you'd think, compared to just thumbing a button on a remote.

[Nelbert]

I see it pretty much being a novelty thing in the same way the wii controls are and fail in the same way polarise glasses do for 3D.

It'll rule out the ability to lay down/curl up in the sofa/comfy chair and operate it. Most of the time I'm not even pointing my remote at the tv when I use it, just in that general direction from whatever position i'm sat/laid in, or even in a different room. Multiple IR/RF extenders are much easier to use than anything requiring arm waving.

Now if someone comes up with voice control Blade Runner style, that would have my interest and my money (assuming it worked as smoothly as in the film).

[wayner]

The Kinect does also come with voice control.

[Nelbert]

Not plugged into a PC it doesn't, it just provides a microphone assuming it's visible down the usb.

Voice recognition with Kinetic is in the xbox software and like all voice control is giving MS some headaches to enable worldwide for the basic commands they're supporting at the moment.

As it's a comodity consumer product I also suspect it's worlds away from natural language processing, speaking at normal volume levels and is more like voice dialing on a phone, voice control in cars, unless you are sat with 5.1/7.1 audio already blasting out the speakers them it'll be anyones guess what it does. Last.FM operates on commands in the form "Xbox : Play" "Xbox : Stop" and not "continue playing the last album I was listening to" which is what I'd want from voice control.

I'm not aware of consumer technology at that point yet and its likely to be quite a while yet.

[wayner]

We are starting to get there... Send Kinect Gesture recognition data over infrared using USB UIRT

http://www.kinect-hacks.com/kinect-h...using-usb-uirt