Kinect Can’t Read Sign Language After All
There was recently released information regarding a patent for Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera Kinect which suggested that the device could understand American Sign Language. Unfortunately, as many speculated, the version of Kinect we will be seeing can’t.
Responding to the claims made in the patent, Microsoft has now told Kotaku “We are excited about the potential of Kinect and its potential to impact gaming and entertainment. Microsoft files lots of patent applications to protect our intellectual property, not all of which are brought to market right away. Kinect that is shipping this holiday will not support sign language.”
“Patent applications need to be far-reaching enough to cover not only current technology but also subsequent evolutions of it, or spin-off ideas based on the same fundamental concepts. “Sign language recognition is a step beyond the final shipping device – the resolution just isn’t there – but then the application also talks about connecting the camera to a PC and that’s not going to happen in the short term either. Both of these scenarios are simply possibilities for utilisation of the sensor.”
So why did the patent suggest it could? Well, sources close to the evolution of Kinect’s development tell us it’s because the version of the hardware that’ll be available later this year isn’t as capable as was originally intended.
The original Kinect had a much higher resolution (over twice that of the final model’s 320×240), and as such, was able to not only recognise the limbs of a player as the current model version can, but their fingers as well (which the current version can’t). And when the hardware could recognise fingers, it would have been able to read sign language.
But that capability came at a cost, and while Microsoft had always intended Kinect to sell for $150, “dumbing down” the camera would have meant that Microsoft wouldn’t be losing as much money on each unit sold, an important point should Kinect prove to be a failure. So dumb it down they did, reducing the camera’s resolution (which in turn reduced the number of appendages it’d have to track) and placing the burden for some of the device’s processing on the console and not Kinect’s own hardware. You have to wonder what they were thinking when they made a plan for a product with it’s complete failure in mind and how to cut their losses before it was even released. It would have been a great addition, although it probably doesn’t make a difference to most gamers anyway. What it does do is allow for room to develop the hardware, maybe having a higher resolution version of Kinect some time in the future, or is this Microsoft’s way of staggering different hardware revisions Nintendo DS Style?
