Yeah, this looks like a step back. I remember reading about Win8 and how its going to integrated with Kinect and how OEMs like Lenovo were already building "Kinect lites" that could fit in a laptop. I wonder what happened to that.
Everything about Kinect on PC is a bit underwhelming. I really don't want to wave at the thing a few inches from me, but I'd love to have it be able to track my eyeballs and be able to click or run macros via lifting fingers, blinking, or moving my jaw. We may be a year or two away from some really exotic UIs.
Kinect for media center looks pretty promising. I have a windows mediapc running windows 7 and am tempted to buy the PC version of the kinect just to control everything via gestures.
I wouldn't call it a step back. That sounds rather pessimistic.
It looks like an experiment, like many great things that come out of Microsoft's research.
The Computer Vision field has certainly gotten far with head-tracking and object recognition.
With a bunch of relatively simple code, you can have a piece of software that tracks your jaw and blinking gestures with a cheap webcam and run whatever macros you choose.
I'm not sure about eyeball following, it depends on the camera's resolution and how much you train the program.
I have myself experimented with head-tracking to replace mouse-look in FPS games. It is very fun to try, save for an eventual headache in Quake 3's Q3DM17 :)
Now, these kinds of experiments are not for the average consumer, but they have been simplified so much over the last few years that the amount of excuses for not trying it out is decreasing.
Could you please provide a little more detail; specifically the "blink gestures"? What libraries, any papers and/or online tutorials? A quick DDG search turned up only one paper from Princeton dating back to Fall '08. Thank you.
"I remember reading about Win8 and how its going to integrated with Kinect and how OEMs like Lenovo were already building "Kinect lites" that could fit in a laptop. I wonder what happened to that."
afaik this was all rumors, nothing was ever confirmed
Everything about Kinect on PC is a bit underwhelming. I really don't want to wave at the thing a few inches from me, but I'd love to have it be able to track my eyeballs and be able to click or run macros via lifting fingers, blinking, or moving my jaw. We may be a year or two away from some really exotic UIs.
Kinect for media center looks pretty promising. I have a windows mediapc running windows 7 and am tempted to buy the PC version of the kinect just to control everything via gestures.