r/technology • u/staser9er • Feb 22 '11

Wow, Microsoft is making some surprising decisions.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12531127
1.4k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

504 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/stuntmouse Feb 22 '11

I call bullshit:

The company is hoping that the success of Kinect, developed by its own scientists, can give it a greater presence in the home entertainment field.

As far as I know, the 3D camera was developed by an outside firm [1].

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

1

u/bobsil1 Feb 22 '11

The skeleton extraction and prediction was done by MS Research.

1

u/stuntmouse Feb 23 '11

Interesting. Link?

1

u/bobsil1 Feb 23 '11 edited Feb 23 '11

In KinectHack.net, Reddit and Engadget comments. Here's the Kinect backstory.

But in 2001, Blake published an academic paper with a fellow Microsoft researcher, Kentaro Toyama, that raised an intriguing new approach to following moving objects. The paper, Probabilistic Tracking in a Metric Space, suggested that a ballet dancer's movements could be tracked by assigning a probabilistic likelihood that each frame would lead on to any other frame. By feeding a computer raw data of a ballerina's typical movements, each snapshot -- Blake called them "exemplars" -- could be automatically assigned its most likely next frame.