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Comment by Qworg | Hacker News Reader

Finally. OpenKinect has had these features for quite a long time. =)

I'm happy that Microsoft is officially supporting these features - and I'm looking forward to seeing what gets built.

Thanks :-) Developer & customer feedback is a big deal for us and we've been working to add new capabilities that people want. Anything else you can think of that you'd like to see us do or enable in the SDK?

I would like the source!

not sure if you're being serious or not :-) while you can't clone our source code's repo, there are some ways that you can inspect things at a lower level: 1) debug .NET framework source (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fc12e472-ac6a-4e77-8...) 2) use a tool like Reflector to inspect our managed layer that we expose in Microsoft.Kinect.dll. We also publish the source code for a number of great samples (look in our Dev Toolkit)

So you don't provide source code, or condone linux access. Why is that, what do you fear?

That's not a hostile question at all! /s

A little guy questioning a humongous pile of money empire (I doubt they'd feel it).

Yup! I am being serious. Can't is just a word, and I don't think anyone would have any real long standing moral qualms if the source were to somehow suddenly appear in someone's mailbox in France! :D

Higher resolution image capture for applications dealing with face recognition would be awesome. Is the team holding off on face recognition until a higher resolution camera/kinect is in place?

The camera resolution is fixed by the hardware. I think they'd have to wait until a better Kinect is built.

That said, you COULD go the way of several hacks I've seen - marry a high resolution external camera to the Kinect rig, do the correspondence, and use the external camera as your face recognition input.

The Kinect (at least the version for the Xbox 360) is capable of providing 1280x1024 Bayer-encoded RGB images at a reduced frame rate.

james: would love to better understand your scenario...might be more guidance we could provide. pls email me more details if you want (kinectninja at microsoft <.> com).

that said, we do enable you to use the infrared feed and marry that to a hi-res external color camera.

Why don't you provide object recognition on a large range of classes, like http://www.image-net.org/ for example, and millions of specific objects + ocr, like what google goggles provides http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

Your sdk is slow moving and limited for all the resources that your empire has at it's disposal.

No need to have a hostile tone here. We have a guy from MS here. I'm sure he doesn't make policy decisions, like what ends up on the SEC report.

Do note, that the SEC report the last I checked, included the biggest competitors as Linux and the GPL. The last they'd give is source for the free masses to use.

Yeah, but they are getting free marketing on here, it's not exactly a bootstrapped startup.

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