kinect

Microsoft this morning pushed Avatar Kinect out to Xbox 360 users with its $150 Kinect motion camera accessory.

The software, which was publicly unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES in January, tracks facial movements and applies them to the user's virtual representation onscreen. That means if your head is cocked, or your eyebrows are raised, those same motions get translated onscreen. The technology is bundled into the Avatar Kinect software, which serves as a casual chat room for up to eight people in one of 24 virtual scenes.

The new chat tool joins a handful of other … Read more

Too busy to keep up with today's tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET (and elsewhere) for Friday, July 22.

• Encrypt your data? Here's a scoop you'll want to read: The U.S. Department of Justice swipes at the online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation over encryption passwords. Here's the situation: A Colorado woman named Ramona Fricosu is being forced to decrypt her laptop for police. Phil Dubois, Fricosu's criminal defense attorney, told CNET's Declan McCullagh that "to force my client (assuming that she has the ability) … Read more

A Bay Village, Ohio, company has sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on its patents with the rapidly selling Kinect motion-sensing video game controller.

Impulse Technology filed the suit in federal court in Delaware, accusing Microsoft and several game makers--including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and THQ--of violating patents related to, among other things, tracking and assessing movement skills in multidimensional space. The suit was filed on July 1, but was only recently written about by the Web site Law360.

Impulse claims that the Kinect violates seven patents, issued from 2001 to last year. In its suit, the company said it notified Microsoft … Read more

While we were less than thrilled with the Kinect Star Wars demo at E3 2011, we're pretty sure this sweet R2-D2-inspired Xbox 360 will sell.

Announced today at Comic-Con 2011, the Limited Edition Kinect Star Wars Bundle will include the custom console with a 320GB HDD, a copy of Kinect Star Wars and Kinect Adventures, a white Kinect sensor, a gold C-3PO-inspired wireless controller, a wired headset, and exclusive downloadable content.

Microsoft formally announced Kinect Star Wars at E3 2011 and demonstrated lightsaber gameplay and force movements. Our own demo netted some awkward results that left an overall stale impression, but we're still eager to see the final product--whenever that may be. The big news today along with the bundle is that podracing will also be a game mode as well.

There's no release date yet for the bundle either, but it'll go for $450. That's not a bad deal if you're starting completely from scratch.

Click through for an enormous detail shot of the R2-D2 Xbox 360 console, complete with a blue--as opposed to green--LED panel.… Read more

You spent countless hours locked in lightsaber battles with your buddies while growing up. What happens when there's no one left to play with you because they all have jobs and babies? You make your own Star Wars playmate.

Students at Stanford University programmed a robotic arm dubbed the JediBot. The bright orange arm swings a red foam lightsaber against a human opponent. It gets off surprisingly snappy attacks with some decent robotic muscle behind it.

It's one thing to create an arm that goes on the offensive, but another to build one capable of defense as well. That's where the Microsoft Kinect comes in. The opposing lightsaber is green so that the Kinect sensors can pick up on where it is in space. The JediBot uses that information to plan its defensive maneuvers.

The robotic arm--which can swing its sword about once every two to three seconds--was created for a 3.5-week Experimental Robotics course. The class also produced a robot that grills hamburgers and even adds the ketchup. The only thing that would make the JediBot better is if it battled you to a draw and then offered you a tasty cheeseburger.… Read more

Harry Potter would be jealous. The folks at ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena are making quadrocopters fly around the room with only hand gestures--no wand required.

The little four-rotor helicopter's remote control is hooked up to a Kinect Xbox controller and the controller's cameras are mounted above the user to give it a top-down view of the user's gestures.

Hold your right hand out, and the quadrocopter hovers a set distance away from you in line with your head and hand. Sweep your right hand, and the quadrocopter moves in the direction your hand's moving. Hold your left hand over your head, and the quadrocopter does a loop. Clap, and the quadrocopter lands.

It sure seems like magic; check out the video below.… Read more

What happens when you mash up a bunch of buzzword technologies together in one video? Look no further than the below presentation, titled "Augmented Reality 3d Video on iPad with Kinect."

iOS developer Laan Labs yesterday demonstrated a concept app (created with the String AR SDK) that can use video captured from Microsoft's Kinect as augmented-reality content when viewed through an iPad 2 camera. This means that one day you could possibly record a video of yourself on a Kinect camera, transfer the data to an AR card, and send a virtual 3D movie greeting of yourself to someone. This could really unleash creative possibilities for your mother-in-law's next birthday card. … Read more

Microsoft's Kinect motion-gaming peripheral is now more accurate than it was at launch, according to Xbox senior product manager David Dennis.

"I think like we showed at E3, like Kudo [Tsunoda, creative director for Kinect] showed with Kinect Fun Labs--a lot of that tech is the advancements we've made in the accuracy, the tracking...being able to show finger tracking in the Sparkles demo he did," Dennis told Eurogamer in an interview published yesterday. He went on to cite Ubisoft's upcoming shooter Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, which allows people to take shots using their hands … Read more

On today's show, we're kind of down on Microsoft Office 365 and poor MySpace's future, but we feel a tiny bit positive about the overlapping circles of nerdiness that could be possible with Google's new Plus social networking beta. Also, find out what you love on Google, if you can, and see all the movies you want for $50 a month. Plus: our new favorite word! Philanthrodorks!