Microsoft creates Kinect-like system using your laptop speaker & microphone | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft creates Kinect-like system using your laptop speaker & microphone

extremetech.com

99 pointsukdm28 comments

If you would like to avoid extremetech, go directly to the source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/cue/so...

> The Doppler effect, if you remember high school physics, is where the frequency of a sound alters depending on your distance from it [...]

Wat!? Is there no hope for science reporting?

There's no history for any reporting. It's always someone whose speciality is anything but the subject they're reporting on, because their speciality is journalism.

This is likely written by a guy who wanted to be a journalist, and liked all those gadgets he got to play with so when he couldn't get hired at a real journalism job, he went to a job he thought he'd get to report on all those cool gadgets and toys he loves, but the pay is utter shit (as most journalism jobs are) so he doesn't have time to fact check his own work. He's not at a major publication so it doesn't get read by an actual fact checker. And the editor likely gives it a 30 second look for any glaring formatting errors and rubber stamps it.

While I can't hear above 16KHz, lots of people can hear up to 20KHz without any trouble. To them this would sound like the highest pitch ringing you could imagine. And don't let any dogs in the room, this would be a continuous dog whistle to them. Very annoying.

Yeah, I would have a real problem with this. I can't be around those sonic rodent repellers or anything similar.

The ironic thing is I can hear those sonic rodent repellers at the very top of my hearing range, yet my dogs are completely not bothered by it. Neither are my friends dogs, one actually goes and sleeps by the one in my living room (I don't believe the devices work, but I have yet to have a reason to bend down and remove it since I moved in).

Sounds pretty neat but I find it hard to be excited since the times I've used Kinect itself, it was actually pretty annoying.

Perhaps it was the setup or something about the room, but I found the response rate slow and the accuracy terrible.

Though maybe combining the two approaches would improve the experience for more conditions and situations.

I agree with this, but it seems to be a software issue in the games themselves. When I view the little stick figure version of me during calibration, that tracks my movements extremely well. So I would expect the games to get better and better as the devs iterate.

Side-note: I really need higher ceilings in my family room. I nearly knocked myself out jumping into the ceiling once. Once.

This kind of little speaker-microphone 'sonar' is the kind of project we would give to undergraduate students as an afternoon practical. It's simple stuff to get going. The real magic that would make this useful is the signal processing and tracking algorithms which turn the extremely inaccurate raw data into something that provides a good user experience.

A few kHz (the gap between what the speakers can do and human hearing) isn't much bandwidth, so this system is going to be highly affected by the tradeoff between range accuracy and Doppler accuracy. If they are attempting to do bistatic (two transmitters) tricks to derive spatial position, then this information will be similarly inaccurate.

I would imagine that most of the real magic will lie in making it work, and work well, as an input method - the video makes it look painfully awkward to use. Even Kinect which works relatively precisely is extremely annoying for anything else than kicking balls around on a screen. Even without interruptions like your children walking in front of the TV, getting Kinect to register an interaction correctly is a process of carefully performing some strange gesture like a wizard executing a spell while on LSD, and then doing it 5 more times until Kinect deems it precise enough. Personally I don't imagine this becoming more precise in the near future than to be useful for perhaps turning pages on a reader or tablet.

This is completely out of my field, but would it be possible to dope a soundtrack with an audible signal to extend your bandwidth, without the actual music causing more interference than the extra bandwidth is worth?

I'd assume that you should be able to predict the type of background noise created by the soundtrack reflecting off a person sitting in front of a computer at a predetermined distance. In 90% of cases we're going to be talking a person sitting in front of a desk.

Again, this is way out of my ballpark.

It looks like this system has absolutely no idea in which direction your hand is moving. Just the speed towards the mic.

Note how they do tetris by fast and slow tapping, and use tapping to reverse the scroll direction.

interesting attempt with mic, but wouldnt it be easier to make the kinect cheaper and smaller and embed it in computers or sell it as a smaller unit?

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

That would be cool but you still need to buy something, this is cheaper I think.

I don't know how well this technology works, but I think a sonar would be more accurate than Kinect at detecting movement.

As I've seen Kinect analyzes 2D images, so you can still trick it to do minimal movements in games, allowing you to interact with an otherwise challenging game without breaking a sweat (except for jumping), while a sonar could model 3D objects more easily. So this could be an interesting alternative.

The Kinect contains a depth camera based on infrared light. It's just like a sonar in the sense that it can "see" absolute distances.

Wonder if it could be combined with more typical ultrasound measurement techniques (time-of-flight, amplitude) to get distance -- combine this with Doppler-derived velocity using a Kalman filter, use stereo microphones for reception, two speakers emitting slightly different frequencies for left-right disambiguation, and you could probably get pretty good absolute measurements.

Cool hack, but why would I want to wave my hands at my laptop? Maybe my imagination is too limited...

I can think of a few examples. Controlling your music player while in another program. For Wii-like games but also for example for making signals to teammates in FPSs. As the article said, presense detection. Perhaps for desktop switching to free up screen real-estate.

All of those things except presence detection can be done by tapping one key or another. For example, most computers have keys for controlling music players, they're just not integrated properly. As the article says, it feels a bit silly to wave you hand in front of the screen what you can just move your finger a couple of inches from whatever you were doing and achieve the same result with a lot less energy.

If we worked like Tom Cruise does in The Minority Report, we'd have a far bigger problem than carpal tunnel syndrome.

But maybe we could use something like this to bring mouseover effects back to tablet computers? Hover your finger above a button and watch it spin before you tap it!

Doesn't Doppler calculation assume that the microphone and speaker are practically the same device (same point in space?). I reckon very few laptops have a setup like that..

No, it makes no such assumption. It's about motion and uses velocity, not position.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect#General

Didn't Morgan Freeman create this circa 2008?

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