An opinion piece at CNN looks at Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, praising the system's capabilities not for gaming, but for what it does to the video viewing experience. "The idea of being able to ditch your table full of remote controls and just use your hands and voice to interact with the TV is compelling. It's much nicer than QWERTY keyboards, which are a terrible idea in the living room. It's also better than Wii-like remote controls, or even using an iPad or smartphone as your TV remote, a feature that cable companies are increasingly rolling out." The problem, as they see it, is Microsoft's inability to actually bring this into common usage for regular television viewing. "It seems like the company is tied too much to the Xbox's substantial gaming revenue to split the Xbox TV stuff off as a separate product — even though there's a huge population of non-gamers who probably have no interest in buying an Xbox." Perhaps this is something that can be addressed by others when the Kinect SDK is released.

An anonymous reader writes "Some students at Rice University were recently asked by Shriner's Hospital to build a rehabilitation tool that makes learning to walk entertaining and engaging. Teaching children with spina bifida, or cerebral palsy can be challenging but the game/balance board walkway helps the children develop their motor skills while giving them incentive to keep at it. It's a really cool application of game technology that actually helps people."

An anonymous reader writes "A research scientist at Georgia Tech has created a 3D scanner app for the iPhone which uses the phone's screen as a light source to quickly capture digital 3D models of faces and other objects. The app, called Trimensional, can output directly to a 3D printer to make physical copies of objects, which a few people have already tried. An Android version is in the works."

dstates writes "As a mostly happy new iPad owner, I love having lots of apps, but I have got to ask, where is the universal set of gestures for navigation? Pinch and open mostly mean zoom out and in, but sometimes you tap to open, sometimes double tap. Sometimes right swipe is back, sometimes there is a back button, sometimes you just have to go to home and navigate back down. Reminds me of the early days of GUIs when every application had its own menu set with different top-level menus and different placement of various functions. Made life chaos for users. We have been there, done that, and gestures are much worse. At least with a menu, you had a printed tag you could read. Gestures are all magic handshakes until you know them. Seems like the tablet community should not have to learn the value of consistency all over again." What gestures would you like to see made standard in touch-based interfaces?

mikejuk writes "Microsoft has given more information on the Kinect SDK to be released later in the year. It will include the body tracking software that is used by the Xbox version of the Kinect, allowing it to track up to two people at the same time and stay locked on to them even if they leave and re-enter the frame. In addition, they promise to allow the microphone array to be used with the PC's speech recognition API. So, not only will future Kinect projects be able to track you — they can listen to what you say."

darthcamaro writes "Remember the Flip? When Pure Digital Technology first came out with the device it was one of the hottest gadgets, providing users with an ultra-portable camcorder. Then Cisco came along and bought the Flip for $590 million in 2009. Now less than two years later, Cisco is throwing the money, 550 employees and the Flip out the door." Wired has an analysis of why Flip floundered. I hope this means I can find a AA-powered Flip UltraHD for $50 in a clearance bin.

An anonymous reader writes "A University of Washington team has developed a piece of free software to help those with motor control problems do what most of us take for granted every day: use a computer mouse to get stuff done. The Pointing Magnifier combines an area cursor with visual and motor magnification, reducing need for fine, precise pointing. The UW team is actively seeking user feedback."

Scottingham writes "Science Daily reports on new research that uses electrodes placed in the speech centers of the brain to move a cursor around the screen. Participants were instructed to utter different vowel sounds while their neural activity was parsed and analyzed. Once analyzed and connected to a cursor-control program, participants quickly learned to use the different vowel sounds to move a cursor around a screen. The system can distinguish between actual speech and the cursor controlling thought sounds."

Zothecula writes "Sweden's eye tracking and control innovator Tobii has announced the release of a stand-alone eye control device called PCEye. Like the laptop-based prototype system demonstrated at CeBIT last month, the device tracks eye movement and translates it into mouse cursor action onscreen. Positioned in front of a PC monitor and connected via USB, the company says that the technology is compatible with a wide range of software and has been primarily designed to improve computer interactivity for users with impaired motor skills, such as stroke victims." The estimated price range is around $7k, so yeah. Start saving your pennies for something cooler.

Malard writes "XBMC users can rejoice, developers from the team have partnered with Motorola to re-develop their previously announced Nyxboard remote with RF, programmable IR and full support on Windows, Mac, Linux and Original Apple TVs."

autospa points out a post (with video) showing off the multi-tasking abilities of the Blit terminal, developed in 1982 by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi. Before Windows, before X, and before the Mac (but somewhat later than the Xerox Alto), the Blit terminal provided a multitasking, mouse-driven graphical interface; it took a Unix server on the other side to do the heavy lifting, though.

An anonymous reader writes "During a recent interview with Walt Mossberg, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer may have inadvertently let it slip that Sony plans to supply Apple with 8 megapixel cameras for the next-gen iPhone. While discussing the Japanese earthquake, Stringer noted that Sony's camera sensor plant in Sendai had been affected and that shipments of 8 megapixel camera sensors to Apple were subsequently delayed."

An anonymous reader writes "In this tongue-in-cheek video, researchers at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies take playful jabs at Google as they demonstrate their software controlling Gmail with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. The gesture controls are strikingly similar to those jokingly suggested by Google in their fictional Gmail Motion application, posted as an April Fools' day prank. The researchers have made their software available for free on their website."

PB8 noted that Google Googol Gilgamesh Gesus has been following all the kinect hacking innovation stealing time-wasting projects that have been floating around the net, and decided to use motion moron sandwich CowboyNeal detection along with a rich visual vocabulary including common gestures and American Sign Language to accelerate your gmail time. This is going to require a bit of a change in my email composition since normally I use those gestures middle-fingers thumb-bites hair-pulls to vent frustration.

An anonymous reader writes "A new mouse performance speed-testing software has scientifically demonstrated that there is virtually no difference between the performance of expensive, high-end gaming mice and cheap laser office mice. The software, called Metalocity, is available for free download so you can test your own mice and confirm the empirical results for yourself. It also shows that the multi-button approach of the Razer Naga and WarMouse Meta increases user speed by up to 112 percent." Note that this report comes from someone who wants to sell you a $80 gaming mouse with a zillion buttons on it, so a grain of salt is required here. But the question is valid: are the expensive mice really worth anything?

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has just published a scientific paper (PDF) and a video showing how the Kinect body tracking algorithm works — it's almost as impressive as some of the uses the Kinect has been put to. This article summarizes how Kinect does it. Quoting: '... What the team did next was to train a type of classifier called a decision forest, i.e. a collection of decision trees. Each tree was trained on a set of features on depth images that were pre-labeled with the target body parts. That is, the decision trees were modified until they gave the correct classification for a particular body part across the test set of images. Training just three trees using 1 million test images took about a day using a 1000-core cluster.'"

Zothecula writes "The decidedly low tech white cane is still one of the most commonly used tools to help the visually impaired get around without bumping into things. Now, through their project called NAVI (Navigation Aids for the Visually Impaired), students at Germany's Universität Konstanz have leveraged the 3D imaging capabilities of Microsoft's Kinect camera to detect objects that lie outside a cane's small radius and alert the wearer to the location of obstacles through audio and vibro-tactile feedback." In addition, Kinect is being used to "manipulate medical images during surgery without having to leave the operating room and scrub back in," and in more artistic ways as well.

baxpace writes "A tutorial posted on Shantanugoel tech blog indicates how you can use your Microsoft Kinect sensor with a PS3. As the posts suggest, the software is at a pre-alpha quality state, meaning that some libraries need to be improved in order to boost performance and features, but it's a start nonetheless."

cylonlover writes "With the plethora of mouse alternatives available or in development you'd be forgiven for thinking the humble computer mouse was some kind of torturous device inflicted upon computer users. But despite a multitude of challengers, the mouse has maintained its dominance while remaining largely unchanged since its unveiling in 1968. Now there's another alternative cursor relocation device set to hit the market called the evoMouse that turns just about any flat surface into a virtual trackpad with your finger as the pointer."

baxpace writes "Thanks to all of the recent breakthroughs of Kinect hacks that have emerged, a new animated series is now in development that incorporates many open source middleware and wrappers available to us all in order to create an entire series with motion capture software using the Kinect, OpenNI, Brekel, MotionBuilder and Maya."