Microsoft waves arms, signals 2.5m Kinect sales
Sony keeping mum
Microsoft has claimed to have sold more than 2.5m Kinect Xbox add-ons since the gadget went on sale earlier this month.
It reckons it'll sell the same volume again before the year is out, most of them in the next 25 days or so, we'd say.
Sony's alternative offering, Move, which requires the player wave a rather phallic controller around, went on sale in September. The Japanese giant has yet to say how many of Moves it has... er... moved globally.
In the US, however, it shifted a million of the things in the first 30 days, with possibly 1.5m in Europe. Together, these totals match the Kinect figure, but required more time to achieve it.
Of course, Sony hasn't yet said how many more Moves it has sold over the last few months, but we'd expect it to be ahead of Microsoft, if only because it has has been on sale for a longer period.
Kinect uses a variety of sensing techniques to track body movement and recognise faces. It has already been hacked to operate with a variety of systems other than the console for which it was intended.
So, a definite success this Crimble, then? Well, one 'psychic' octopus doesn't think so. ®
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COMMENTS
Doesn't understand gaming by my reckoning
They looked at this tech in 2002, 3 years before current gen systems, and found it had too many issues then.
The guy clearly doesn't understand gaming. He understands teenagers in bedrooms playing FPS's. Gaming is meant to be fun. And kinect sure as hell looks like fun. Accuracy and lag are software, not hardware issues. And the sheer enormity of possibilities with it are enticing, it's just down to developers to use it well.
He also doesn't seem to understand what the market wants at large. But then the playstation 3 has never been aimed at mass market, so there's no reason to try and aim the move that way, the ps3 is just too expensive to get into that niche.
Kinect has marketed itself perfectly. It's obviously fantastic for families, wives, etc etc, fitness and dancing games with great accuracy and feedback. And at the end of the day, you still have a HD console with a glut of "hardcore" (ridiculous phrase) games.
Background subtraction
hands fingers.... I've taken a good look at this and a lot of the hacks are just doing background subtraction and then doing an image match on the restultant 2D silohuette i.e. does that look more like an open hand or a closed one?
Sony apparently did a lot of work developing background subtraction on the EyeToy for the PS2 and found out, in reality, it wasn't much use and didn't really offer any benefits.
What I want to see is.....
a person rendered in 3D space manipulating a virtual 3D object with their hands, then I'll be impressed. Becuase that's what everyone wants it to do.
http://www.kinecthacks.net/
All this webcam game crap is to be frank, un-impressive.
Hands, Fingers etc
>Onto hand/fingers, I have to agree, to have this degree of accuracy would have been wonderful
Question of scale/distance - UX/IX folk working on close up applications with the Kinect attached to a desktop PC a la Web Cam are having no problem with finger tracking, handshapes, orientation etc applications......
MS have given tacit approval to hacking with Kinect, and the stuff emerging after just a few weeks will probably surprise techincal skeptics and those uninterested in gaming....better showcase than some of the release titles, though Dance Central is pretty impressive and Adventures/JoyRide a big hit with my previously Wii fanatic kids...
Google for DepthJS, Oliver Kreylos [the dual kinect applications are awesome] or Evoluce to name just a few interesting hacks away from the Xbox.....
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