Kinect on E3 and the future

[Auri]

Very excited about Kinect developments - the major barrier for me (and I suspect many) for using Vox Commando is the lack of a microphone that can somehow filter out the ambient noise and stop VC from taking commands from it. Very hopeful that this 'green zone' idea could be the answer

VC functioning freely and naturlly, combined with integrated motion control of xbmc, and i'll be some kind of home media jedi.

+1 to that, amen !

[jitterjames]

It looks like there is some potential for the Kinect, but if you don't already have one, I think the Amulet is still going to be the winner.  The Kinect might be more "fun" to use at first, but in terms of a home theatre setup, the Amulet is just much more practical.  Also, I can take my Amulet out onto the deck with me.  Unless you already own a Kinect, the price is comparable.

[Auri]

It looks like there is some potential for the Kinect, but if you don't already have one, I think the Amulet is still going to be the winner.  The Kinect might be more "fun" to use at first, but in terms of a home theatre setup, the Amulet is just much more practical.  Also, I can take my Amulet out onto the deck with me.  Unless you already own a Kinect, the price is comparable.

Well james ... those not on continental US are not able to get an amulet remote short of visiting US and buy it while being there

So for europe the "easiest" way would be a kinect if it does the job!

Quick question also James or other Kinect owners, do you know if the current kinect 'for xbox30' will be the exact same as the future kinect they will release for PC ?  Will they just release PC drivers for windows and then you have to buy a kinec for 360 or will it be new hardware ?  Anyone got ideas on that ?

[jitterjames]

as far as I know it is the same kinect hardware for XBOX 360 or PC.  I would be wary if buying a used Kinect but with a new one it should not be a problem.

[Foggy]

Hi All,

I hope this helps.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectSDKQuickstarts

Keep up the good work.

Best Wishes.


James..

[Auri]

Hi All,

I hope this helps.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectSDKQuickstarts

Keep up the good work.

Best Wishes.


James..

Wow that is amazing, atleast the last video "Audio Fundamentals" for sure might be usefull for James, specially the "Set AutomaticGainControl = FALSE" for use with Voice Recognition.

PS : Kinect owners ... here in Belgium there is a discount action this week where I can buy a Kinect for 99 Euro's instead of the regular 135 Euro's ... should I go for it ... or should I wait, I would only use kinect to have an open-air mic for XBMC and maybe control xbmc/vc/eg through skeleton tracking later on.

[mclough6]

I can only speak for myself, but I have only rarely seen Vox respond to ambient commands and I have had a microphone very close to speakers.  It is possible of course, but my experience is it is not as big a problem as one may expect.

[Auri]

I can only speak for myself, but I have only rarely seen Vox respond to ambient commands and I have had a microphone very close to speakers.  It is possible of course, but my experience is it is not as big a problem as one may expect.

So you are using kinect already as a mic for Vox ?

[jitterjames]

I should probably let McLough6 answer that but I don't think that's what he meant.  I think he was talking about a regular microphone.

I have tried using the Kinect as a microphone with the standard version of VoxCommando and it sucks.  It is among the worst of the microphones that I have ever tested and if there is any ambient sound it won't work reliably at all.  If you want to use the Kinect to record your voice using sound recorder, you can expect it to sound very bad, unless I was unfortunate enough to get a defective model.

In order to make use of the Kinect with VoxCommando, I will need to write special code to tie directly into the Kinect features and I will need to use a special "audio model" which is provided by microsoft.  I have done some tests with this (not actually incorporated into VC - just doing straight recognition of some test phrases) and the results seem pretty good... (but not mind blowing), even from 7 feet with music playing at a medium low level.  I believe this "audio model" only exists in English at the moment, and who knows if Microsoft will ever expand this to other languages.

Honestly I dont' know what microsoft was thinking telling people that they can just hook up a Kinect and start using it with Windows Speech Recognition, because the results are simply terrible.  They must be masochists, trying to undo all of the hard work they have done on WSR and also trying to destroy the good hype that Kinect has got going on.

[jitterjames]

I also just discovered that Kinect SDK does not support open dictation.  All commands have to be predefined.  So doing things like google search or asking VC to translate a sentence will be impossible, but pause, play, play artist David Bowie, etc. commands will still work.

I don't recommend buying a Kinect!  Maybe later...

[mclough6]

I was responding to iswasdoes comment on page one.  I should have been more specific.

[Auri]

Ok thank you all for your insight and I will follow your advice for now James and not invest in a Kinect.

I truely hope something mainstream as a "plug&play kinect" will be the answer to the heavy need of a good "open air" mic for vox, albeit with some extra coding or ...

I will follow your progress in that matter closely if you are still willing to invest time in it James.

Regards
Auri

[jitterjames]

I have a Kinect and I am interested in it, so for sure I will play with it when I have time.  I hope to have something for people to test by end of July but I'm not promising anything!  Also it will probably not be complete on account of the licensing issues.  It would have to be a demo of some kind.  Or a scaled down free version.

[iswasdoes]

I can only speak for myself, but I have only rarely seen Vox respond to ambient commands and I have had a microphone very close to speakers.  It is possible of course, but my experience is it is not as big a problem as one may expect.

I too have used a regualr mic with fairly good results, but even one false command can ruin the experience, and I recieved quite a few unwanted pauses, track skips and so on. I also had to shout quite loud to make my commands heard.

It looks like there is some potential for the Kinect, but if you don't already have one, I think the Amulet is still going to be the winner.  The Kinect might be more "fun" to use at first, but in terms of a home theatre setup, the Amulet is just much more practical.  Also, I can take my Amulet out onto the deck with me.  Unless you already own a Kinect, the price is comparable.

I don't know much about the amulet remote but I understand it is a remote with a mic in? Maybe im missing something, but for me the benefits of something like vox commando is to take the remote out of the equation. If I have to carry a remote around with me to make commands, I may as well press the buttons!

Obviously I get that even having to hold a remote VC offers a great shortcut for many commands and is more fun to use, but I think the goal of the software would be to allow a user to make complely natural voice commands with no peripherals on their person. I think that James would agree that this would be the ultimate. Its a shame that kinect is not a fast track solution to that as I think many hoped it would be as it was seemingly designed with this use in mind, however I have hope that further experimentation with the device will unlock new possibilities (paticularly with the gesture commands working in parallel).

All I can do is wish James luck, and look forward to a later release after some experierimentation with kinect with some optimism,

[jitterjames]

OK,

Anyone who has a Kinect already and wants to be an alpha tester, please send me a pm.  I don't want to post anything on the site because of licensing issues.

the alpha may or may not work for you, but it will have the following limitations due to limitations of the current beta SDK provided by Microsoft.

1) English only.  I don't know if this means that you need to have english on your OS or if english needs to be the current display language.  You can test this for me.  This shouldn't be a big deal since most of us are using it in English mode, even if we are using other languages.  But it may require you to switch to english as your display language.

2) No dictation commands.  All possible commands need to be specified so open dictation is not possible.  In other words, "google search: the speed of light" type commands won't work.

3) No acoustic echo cancellation. (probably).  There is a bug in the SDK.  If you try to enable AEC when you don't have some audio playing from your PC it won't work.  It won't generate any kind of error message either so it just seems as if your Kinect is broken. 

4) Groups.  Turning groups on and off may be disabled in the first alpha.  I'll have to rewrite a lot of code to get this working again.  Same goes for confirmation grammars and WMC play song "xyz" by current artist command.

5) Delay.  I've noticed a small but annoying delay with the Kinect using speech recognition.  This seems to be "built in" and you'll notice it with the samples provided by Microsoft in the SDK.

the first test I create will try to indicate your position relative to the Kinect but won't actually do anything with the data (yet).  Later we may only react to commands coming from certain directions.

As for gestures, to the best of my knowledge the SDK only supports full body skeleton tracking, so unless you want to be standing, at least 8 feet from your Kinect to watch movies, with no other obstructions like coffee tables etc...    I need to look into this more.  The SDK provide two sample tracking applications and both use full skeleton tracking which won't turn on until it can see your whole body.

Are you excited?