Hi Folks,
I found this article about a new way to interact with games interesting but
don't know if it is blind accessible.
With Kinect, Microsoft Aims for a Game Changer
Alex Kipman of Microsoft tries out Kinect, an Xbox 360 add-on that follows
players' movements.
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: October 23, 2010 The New York Times
REDMOND, Wash.
Tim Nichols watches players test the system.
Don Mattrick leads Microsoft's interactive entertainment unit.
Ricochet, a game for Xbox Kinect.
TIM NICHOLS measures fun.
A slim, 32-year-old psychologist, he spends his days behind a one-way mirror
at Microsoft's video games research center here, watching people play the
company's Xbox systems. He looks for smiles, listens for ecstatic squawks
and logs triumphant gyrations. When a game is good, it elicits all the above
and gets a "fun score" high enough for Microsoft to consider selling it.
And, of late, the fun quotient has skyrocketed.
The company's blend of game developers, interface whizzes and
artificial-intelligence experts has built Kinect, a $150 add-on for the
popular Xbox 360 console that hits stores next month. With its squat,
rectangular shape and three unevenly spaced eyes, this black device looks
like a genetically underserved creature from "Star Wars."
In fact, Kinect arrives with a healthy dose of sci-fi trappings. Microsoft
has one-upped Sony and Nintendo by eliminating game controllers and their
often nightmarish bounty of buttons. Kinect peers out into a room, locks
onto people and follows their motions. Players activate it with a wave of a
hand, navigate menus with an arm swoosh and then run, jump, swing, duck,
lunge, lean and dance to direct their on-screen avatars in each game.
"I can't tell you how many times I have seen people try and do the
moonwalk," says Mr. Nichols, as he recalls their first, curious encounters
with their virtual mimics.
Kinect also understands voice commands. People can bark orders to change
games, mute the volume or fire up offerings, like on-demand movies and
real-time chatting during TV shows that flow through the Xbox Live
entertainment service.
The mass-market introduction of Kinect - with its almost magical gesture and
voice-recognition technology - stands as Microsoft's most ambitious, risky
and innovative move in years. Company executives hope that Kinect will carry
the Xbox beyond gamers to entire families. But on a grander note, the
technology could erase a string of Microsoft's embarrassing failures with
mobile phones, music players, tablets and even Windows from consumers' minds
and provide a redemptive beat for the company.
"For me it is a big, big deal," says Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief
executive. "There's nothing like it on the market."
Where Apple popularized touch-screen technology, Microsoft intends to
bombard the consumer market with its gesture and voice offerings. Kinect
technology is intended to start in the living room, then creep over time
throughout the home, office and garage into devices made by Microsoft and
others. People will be able to wave at their computer and tell it to start a
videoconference with Grandma or ask for a specific song on the home stereo.
"I think this is the first thing out of the consumer side of Microsoft in a
long, long time where they are in front of everyone else," says Joel
Johnson, an editor at large at Gizmodo, the gadget site. "I want a Kinect in
every room of my house, watching me and listening to what I am saying. It's
so sci-fi and next level that it would be amazing."
The on-time arrival of amazing has become a rare occurrence at Microsoft, a
fact not lost on investors or Microsoft's directors.
The company continues to rely on its Windows, Office and business software
franchises for the bulk of its $62.5 billion in annual revenue. In
high-growth areas like phones and tablets, Microsoft has long sold software
but has watched Apple come out of nowhere to gobble up the most profits.
With such successes, Apple overtook Microsoft in May as the world's most
valuable tech company and has since swelled that lead to more than $62
billion. Microsoft's board gave Mr. Ballmer the fiscal equivalent of a
timeout by docking his bonus over the last fiscal year, pointing to
lackluster mobile technology and a dearth of innovation. And whether Kinect
can revamp Microsoft's image as an innovator remains a big question.
Critics knock Kinect games as too easy and say the gesture technology still
has annoying kinks. They also say Microsoft has had a nasty habit of gumming
up its creative engines with bureaucracy.
"They often got lost in fights between all their divisions," Mr. Johnson
says. "Anytime something becomes high-profile, middle management slows it
down."
But with Xbox, Microsoft has so far done right by consumers and has barreled
ahead. It has sold 42 million Xbox 360 consoles and has 25 million people
signed up for Xbox Live. In September alone, people spent a billion hours
using Xbox systems.
Microsoft has long salivated over the notion of controlling the living room
and becoming a major entertainment force. Kinect may well stand as its best
bet yet for turning that vision into a reality. "This is an incredibly
amazing, wonderful first step toward making interactivity in the living room
available to everybody," says Mr. Ballmer, while cautioning that Microsoft
still has "a lot of work to do."
ON a Tuesday this month, Allen Walker, 49, and his son Chris, 16, tested a
Kinect car-racing game at the research center. The test room felt clinical
with its bare walls, overhead cameras and just a television for company.
Given no instructions on how to use Kinect, the father and son reached the
initial game menu on their own in a couple of minutes - and saw their
virtual selves staring back. They waved, kicked their legs and wiggled a
bit, and their avatars followed suit. When the game started, the Walkers
tilted left and right to steer, pulled their torsos back to rev up the
engine and then thrust forward to accelerate up ramps and soar through the
air.
At the end of each game, photos and videos appeared that documented their
comical flailing and elicited huge smiles from them. (The photos are likely
to become prime Facebook fodder come November.)
Several times, Mr. Walker nudged Chris out of the way to take control of the
system, thus embracing the uncommon role of game-play adviser to his son.
Making such complex technology so easy to use bordered on the impossible
three years ago, when a small group of Microsoft employees gathered to plot
Kinect's future. Plenty of companies have spent decades refining gesture-
and voice-recognition technology. Typically, however, it works best in
controlled environments. Cameras and sensors that perceive movements often
need steady, abundant light, while voice technology tends to hinge on the
assumption that a microphone is near a user's mouth.
Microsoft's engineers knew they wouldn't have the luxury of fixed settings
with Kinect. They had to build a product that could work just as well in a
small Japanese living room as in a spacious Texas-size den. And it would
have to adjust for varying light conditions and the raucous commotion of
people at different distances from its sensor.
"No one had tried to solve these problems in the consumer space and put all
of this together," says Don Mattrick, the president of Microsoft's
interactive entertainment business.
For Kinect's eyes, Microsoft turned to PrimeSense, based in Tel Aviv. It
links a standard Web camera with a pair of sensors to offer depth
perception. One sensor emits light near the infrared range, giving Kinect
its own light source impervious to ambient conditions. The other sensor
monitors users' distance from the device.
THE eyes were nice, but if only Kinect had a brain.
Adding the smarts required Microsoft's artificial-intelligence experts and
thousands of test subjects. Microsoft found people of varying shapes and
sizes and recorded how they moved by monitoring 48 joints in their bodies.
Over time, the algorithms that digest this data became better and better,
allowing the system to work with pregnant women and children in baggy
clothes as well as with average-size adults in T-shirts and shorts.
Microsoft upgrades and rewires the Kinect brain every 24 hours and can send
updates to Xbox systems via the Internet when it chooses. Kinect recognizes
someone it has seen before by body shape, so there's no need to log into the
system each time a game is played. It knows your left hand from your right
and can distinguish between two players even when their paths cross.
If players have similar builds, Kinect tries to glean differences in their
facial features, haircuts, body movements and clothing color. And if
identically dressed twins initially stump the system, it will ask each to
say something.
"If it can't disambiguate, we say, 'Please tell us if you are A or B,' "
says Alex Kipman, incubation director for Xbox 360. "Then, you end up with
the equivalent of a different bar code."
On a more futuristic note, Kinect might see that you're wearing a Dallas
Cowboys jersey during a football game and switch the commentary to the
voices of the Dallas announcers.
For voice commands, the device relies on four microphones in an asymmetrical
configuration that helps home in on the person giving commands and separate
out the chatter of other people on the sofa. Kinect also knows when sound
comes from the TV or from a game and can block the extra noise from
interfering with the voice commands.
"If we are serious about shifting the entire computing industry to this
world where the devices understand you, then the technology needs to be
robust," Mr. Kipman says. "Otherwise, it's just a gimmick."
SURPASSING gimmick status may be Kinect's biggest hurdle.
People like Mr. Johnson from Gizmodo note that the first batch of Kinect
games differs sharply from the war and adventure sagas that have driven Xbox
sales. The weapons have been replaced by water rafts, Ping-Pong paddles and
yoga poses through games similar to those that families found with Nintendo's
Wii.
"It's not being used to its full potential in gaming yet," Mr. Johnson says
of Kinect. "It's mostly Wii-class party games and jumping around."
Sony contemplated advancing its own gesture-recognition technology to the
3-D realm and eliminating controllers, but it decided that gamers wouldn't
find the experience satisfactory at this point. Instead, it built Move, a
wand-like controller with more sophisticated movement-tracking features than
the Wii wand.
"I totally agree that there is this magical feeling with using your hands to
select something," says Richard Marks, a senior researcher at Sony Computer
Entertainment America, who helped create Move. "But that feeling wears off
pretty quickly, and it becomes a pretty cumbersome way to do things."
Sony executives tip their hat to Microsoft for trying something risky, but
like some other people who've tested Kinect, say the system seems to lag,
hindering truly immersive games. Still, game makers like Harmonix Music
Systems describe Kinect as filling a void and credit Microsoft for making
something new possible.
Harmonix, which sells the Rock Band music game, will offer Dance Central, a
game made for Kinect that teaches dance routines to songs like "Poker Face,"
from Lady Gaga, and "Bust a Move," from Young MC.
"We've been trying to find technology that would allow the player to use
their whole body," says Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom, a vice president at
Harmonix. "We wanted to remove the technology and really allow people to
dance."
Harmonix hired a team of choreographers to come up with the routines, which
range from simple, rhythmic motions to acrobatic affairs that only skilled
dancers can handle.
"It really is a toy, and I mean that in the best sense of the word," says
Ted Brown, a game designer at Buzz Monkey, which produces games for the
major console makers. "There is magic there when you can sort of put on a
skin and perform on the stage."
The first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft $30,000 to build, but 1,000
workers would eventually be involved in the project. And now, hundreds of
millions of dollars later, the company has a product it can sell for $150 a
pop and still turn a profit, Mr. Mattrick says. (People who don't have an
Xbox can pay $300 for a package that includes the console, Kinect and a
game.)
Microsoft has spent several months marketing Kinect, even setting up a
speakeasy-style site in Los Angeles where celebrities like Justin Bieber and
Tony Hawk could play games, and drink and eat with friends, after saying a
password to gain entry. All told, Microsoft expects to spend "hundreds of
millions" to advertise the device, Mr. Mattrick says.
For Mr. Ballmer, Kinect is far more than a business opportunity or a
pleasant diversion for consumers. It offers a moment to prove to investors
and company directors that Microsoft is capable of an Applesque,
game-changing moment under his leadership.
"I'm excited to be way out in front," he says, "and want to push the pedal
on that."
A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2010, on page BU1
of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/business/24kinect.html?src=busln
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