Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

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If the rumors that the Xbox One won't power on without the Kinect attached are true, it'll be difficult to convince people to part with their used New Kinects for more interesting purposes.

I do look forward to seeing what can be done with the higher resolution, and especially, the higher field of view. My own application of the old Kinect, home automation, would benefit greatly from a wider FOV. Ditching the tilt motor was a good idea; I have to tell my customers to mount the Kinect without the tilt motor anyway due to stability issues.

I don't look forward to a day when everyone has Fahrenheit 451 full-wall screens (Illumiroom) combined with 1984-style monitoring capabilities (Kinect, PS Eye, smart TVs with built-in cameras). All the awesome things being done with modern technology and machine learning could be done on local CPUs without dialing home. I have to say I'm disappointed, although I'm not sure whether I'm more disappointed by technology companies for centralizing information gathering, or by the fact that my junior high librarian told me to read these books, making me aware of the dystopian possibilities.

Are you saying the new kinect offloads the image processing stuff to a cloud somewhere, like with Siri?

That's absolutely frightening.

Related: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/the_eyes_and_e...

This seems incorrect. The xbox has more than enough processing power to handle the tasks locally.

The new Kinect has been reported to have all of the processing it needs internally - and a 2 GB/s data link to push it all down.

I'm really excited to see what price point this comes in at.

No, that was just a general reference to current cloud-based trends.

> If the rumors that the Xbox One won't power on without the Kinect attached are true, it'll be difficult to convince people to part with their used New Kinects for more interesting purposes.

i read somewhere that they're, logically, planning to release a second-generation kinect for windows [1] soon after the console-version ships, which should alleviate that concern.

i always imagined that's what most people use for non-gaming purposes anyway, especially as the console-version uses a proprietary connector.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/

The console Kinect uses standard usb and works with open source drivers. Kinect for Windows is also usb but requires Windows drivers.

thanks for the clarification; i wasn't aware of the driver distinction between the two. however, it seems we're both right on the connector part.. it originally used standard usb but has since been updated to use a different connector. from wikipedia [1]:

> Because the Kinect sensor's motorized tilt mechanism requires more power than the Xbox 360's USB ports can supply, the device makes use of a proprietary connector combining USB communication with additional power. Redesigned Xbox 360 S models include a special AUX port for accommodating the connector, while older models require a special power supply cable (included with the sensor) that splits the connection into separate USB and power connections; power is supplied from the mains by way of an AC adapter

..having purchased by console after the refresh i wan't aware it ever supported standard usb. it seems this will carry-over to the xbox one as well, given it too has a dedicated port for the kinect [2]..

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect#Technology

[2] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one-photos/#slid...

People use the Xbox version of the Kinect because it's better supported by open source tools than K4W, and because it can be obtained used for very cheap. Adapters are available for less than $10.

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