kinect

Help! Santa can't afford the iPad. Will the Kindle Fire do?

It's Black Friday, the busiest day of the shopping year, and Ask Maggie is here to help you with questions about holiday shopping.

In this edition, I offer some advice to one mother considering substituting an Amazon Kindle Fire for an iPad as gift for her son. And I suggest a game console for a gaming newbie, who wants to get the whole family up and moving this Christmas.

Ask Maggie is an advice column that answers readers' wireless and broadband questions. The column now appears twice a week on CNET offering readers a double dosage of Ask Maggie'… Read more

Siri follows in Kinect's tinkering footsteps. Will Apple?

commentary What do Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Kinect have in common besides processing voice commands? Right from the get-go they were both a top target for tinkerers.

Look no further than this past weekend's very neat hack of Siri, which managed to get the voice software--which is perhaps best known for being the first major voice recognition system that has a personality--to control a home thermostat.

Not content with searching for weather reports and dictating voice notes, programmer Peter Lamonica put together a software workaround to funnel Siri's voice commands through a separate server, then used those commands to interface with the digital thermostat. The end result let Siri both check and change the temperature settings, using Apple's servers to do the heavy lifting when it came to transcribing. Keep in mind this is just a little more than a month out from the release of the iPhone 4S.

Is this a watershed moment for the kinds of things mobile phones can do? No, but it was a big one for Siri. Users took some of its basics, and rethought the kinds of things they could do with it.

Something very similar happened with the Kinect last year. Unlike Apple, which packaged Siri as an exclusive software feature within the iPhone 4S, Microsoft sold the Kinect as a $150 add-on for its Xbox 360 platform. The move gave owners of a five-year old piece of hardware new ways to control their system, and games with voice and motion controls.

Seeing a cool new gadget to hack, tinkerers--and not just Xbox owners--took to the platform immediately, wanting to have their way with the hardware, and use it in places Microsoft was not yet offering, like on desktop PCs. A week after the Kinect's release, that's just what happened. … Read more

Microsoft embraces Kinect hacks, readies PC hardware

Microsoft, which has gradually embraced hackers tinkering with its Kinect motion-sensing video game controller, is now working on a Kinect for PCs.

Ever since Kinect debuted last year, hackers have fiddled with the device to come up with scores of new uses for it, everything from using gestures to navigate a computer's file system to providing visual sensors for robots.

But those hacks relied on a Kinect that is optimized to detect gamers standing several feet away. In a blog post, Craig Eisler, general manager of Kinect for Windows, said the company is shortening the USB cable and adding … Read more

Look for $99 Kinect, other Xbox deals for Black Friday

The Kinect motion-control camera peripheral for the Xbox 360 will be available for $99 during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period, according to Microsoft.

The discounted Kinect (it's usually $149) will be available from "participating retailers" from November 24 through November 28. Microsoft pointed us towards a few other deals on Xbox hardware and games as well, which include:

Kinect from $99 (regularly $149) Three-month Xbox Live Gold subscription for $12.99 (regularly $24) Gears of War 3 for $39 (regularly $59) Forza Motorsport 4 for $39 (regularly $59) Dance Central 2 for $29 (regularly $49) Kinect Sports 2 for $29 (regularly $49) Xbox 360 consoles ($199 - $399) discounted by $50 to $100 (from November 24 through November 26 only)… Read more

When Siri met the Terminator

Look out Siri, there's a new virtual assistant in town--and you definitely don't want to get on his bad side.

YouTube user programmer4fun has created his own virtual personal assistant using a 3D model of the Terminator T-800 cyborg and his Microsoft Kinect.

In his video description, programmer4fun explains that he used the Kinect SDK to make use of the head tracking and speech recognition software. The Kinect sits behind him, though he notes it can be anywhere, while a small LED projector beams the Terminator's head onto the wall. He's even built in code to support anaglyph 3D if you really want to get up close and personal with the Terminator. … Read more

A Halloween use for Microsoft's Kinect? Murder

Microsoft's been busy today promoting non-gaming uses for its Kinect motion-sensing controller. The folks at the software giant's developer division have come up with one that isn't sanctioned by the company: murder.

Channel 9, the Microsoft group that evangelizes its products to developers, posted its annual Halloween video over the weekend, one of the most anticipated offerings from a unit that mostly produces technical how-to programs. This year's effort is a blood-spattering short titled, Kinect to Kill.

An homage to slasher films, Kinect to Kill shows workers at an unnamed company that looks a lot like … Read more

Launch set for Kinect for Windows commercial SDK

Microsoft is finally opening up its Kinect motion-gaming peripheral for commercial, third-party applications.

The software giant said today that starting in early 2012, any company will be able to access a Kinect software development kit (SDK) that will let them create commercial applications for Windows. Already, 200 companies, including Toyota and Razorfish, are taking advantage of Microsoft's commercial SDK as part of a pilot program.

Microsoft did not announce an exact release date for its commercial SDK.

A commercial SDK is a long time coming for companies that have been hoping to take advantage of Kinect on PCs. Currently, … Read more

Cracking Captcha

Google TV uncovers an update, something is sucking the life from the iPhone 4S, and evil robots cannot be stopped by Captcha...or at least some of them.

Links from Monday's spook-tacular episode of Loaded:

Captchas can't stop evil bots Google TV... it's baaaaack GameStop gone mad? It's selling tablets now. The Microsoft Kinect SDK is alive! What's sucking the life from iPhone 4S? Subscribe:  iTunes (MP3) |  iTunes (320x180) |  iTunes (HD) |  RSS (MP3) |  RSS (320x180) |  RSS HD

Will Xbox Bing solve the video search problem?

Streaming video has exploded in the home theater.

Only a few years ago there was only Netflix, but now Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus, and Vudu all offer top-notch streaming video services. The variety is great, but it forces streaming video fans to keep a mental catalog of where their favorite shows and movies are available. When I rereviewed the Apple TV, I almost rented "The Trip" for $5 before I realized it was available for free on Netflix.… Read more