Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

At first I was really skeptical that the motion stuff was more Hollywood demo than reality. Then I took a closer look at the sensor bar:

http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/e3xbox/e3xbox300.jpg

I don't think that yellow thing to the left is a camera, but if both those other holes are cameras, then that would mean the XBox could indeed be getting full 3D information on you, and that really does open up some interesting possibilities. I doubt the demos are possible with silhouettes, but with full 3D information... maybe.

I remain skeptical until I try it, but I have to admit I'm intrigued. This really could be a big deal. It's cool not because current games will translate to this; they're all specialized for current controllers. It's cool because this will enable new things, some of which are things that the Wii seemed to hint at but doesn't seem to have been able to execute on.

I assume that the tech inside the camera is same as the 3DV ZCam, who MS purchased a few months ago. One camera captures RGB images, the other captures depth information from infrared pulses. The depth cam isn't very high res (I think 320x240 @ 30fps), but it doesn't really need to be for gesture recognition.

I've worked with the ZCam and its kind of finicky - its very sensitive to how the depth sensor is calibrated. Also, the depth sensing doesn't work well with reflective surfaces that I've seen. I'm curious if/how they've gotten around those issues.

There are indeed two cameras and a microphone array. The hardware design is still not final, but it is able to extract accurate depth information. Similarly, the software is not final, but the skeletal tracking demos which I have seen have been pretty impressive.

In the interest of correctness, I should say they aren't both normal cameras. In the interest of keeping my job, I won't say more. Needless to say: our APIs will provide at least depth, color, and skeletons. Cool stuff :-)

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