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"  What has response to the system been like so far? Alex Kipman: It&amp;#039;s been pretty phenomenal. What Kinect does is create unique, never-before-seen experiences designed from the ground up in a way that&amp;#039;s simple and approachable for everyone. From young to old, from gamer to nongamer, people say, &amp;quot;Wow that really does work. That&amp;#039;s pure magic.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s the most humbling experience that I&amp;#039;ve ever had.  The Kinect technology is composed of an RGB camera, a depth sensor and a mulitarray mic. Why are all these technologies necessary? Since we&amp;#039;re working toward a vision where technology fundamentally understands us, you need to have enough sensing power to really do that. The way you can think about it is, Kinect has eyes and it has ears. It can perceive the world like your eyes do and listen to the world like your ears do. We also have the brain, the thing that takes all of this sensory input information and translates it into identity and voice recognition in human tracking.   The human eye allows us to do is see the room in any lighting condition. I don&amp;#039;t want the Kinect to be bound by the lighting conditions of the room I want the system to see in a cave where there&amp;#039;s no light whatsoever and I want it to see in a brightly lit room where people have lots of light. Because of this, you don&amp;#039;t need to adjust lighting for the system to work. You just do what&amp;#039;s natural for you in your living room and we take care of the rest.  When playing the game Kinectimals, the animal characters seem to react to the mood of the user. How does this technology determine a person&amp;#039;s emotional state? Remember watching the Charlie Brown and Snoopy TV show? All you&amp;#039;d ever hear the parents say was &amp;quot;wah, wa, wah, wah.&amp;quot; While you couldn&amp;#039;t understand what they were saying, you knew if they were mad or happy. For Kinect, we created the equivalent of an empathy engine. So it&amp;#039;s not like we&amp;#039;re recognizing if you&amp;#039;re happy or sad, but, based on the inclination of your voice and the positioning of your body, we can guess in a way that seems like magic.  The system uses a motor to pan and scan the room. It feels a little creepyknowing this piece of technology is watching me. Why is this necessary? This comes down to having technology that understands you, so you don&amp;#039;t have to understand it. Turns out, people can put Kinect&amp;#039;s sensor anywhere in the roomthey can put it above their television, they can put it beneath their television, they can put it on the floor or on the ceilings. But depending on where you put it, you&amp;#039;re going to have to tilt it to make sure the sensor sees the room. We&amp;#039;d rather have this taken care of already. Have you ever tried taking a picture of yourself on a camera that&amp;#039;s sitting across the room on a tripod? It becomes complicated. If we are true to our visionmaking technology disappear and understand uswe need to be able to position the sensor for optimal play space without you having to touch it. This is why we added a motor. When you turn on the device, the system sees the room, understands both acoustic and visual characteristics, and then settles on optimal viewing conditions and acoustic conditions so you don&amp;#039;t have to.  Kinect is available for $150or $300 for the Xbox console and Kinect bundle. To price this new technology in a way that works for consumers, did you have to kill off any features that you wish you could have kept? Not really. The tradeoffs we made were part of a very explicit decision to make the eyes and ears be the commodities, or shelf components, and push all of the innovation to the brain, or software. We decided to do this through the cloud, so we can continuously make improvements to the system over time. This allows us to hit an affordable price point because the shelf components all exist in volume. But with Kinect, we live in a world where the only thing that binds us is a lack of imagination. This is a world of software. It&amp;#039;s not bound by physics. We&amp;#039;re only beginning to tap into the deep emotional experiences we can create with the pallet we brought to market.   If you look at Xbox and titles that launched in 2005 with the 360, like Halo 2 and Call of Duty, and then you look at the titles today, like Halo: Reach or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, still on top of the 360, today&amp;#039;s franchises look nothing like the originals. While the hardware hasn&amp;#039;t changed, the games look dramatically different. All of the innovation happened on the platform of software. The same thing will occur here. We are starting a journey where we have created the hardware, and we will continue to improve the software platform. 2 years from nowand I&amp;#039;m making up that two years, it could be 6 months or next monthyou could start seeing games that don&amp;#039;t look anything like games we&amp;#039;re creating now.  Will Kinect introduce games that appeal to the hardcore gaming community? Yes. See, the Xbox has been, is and will continue to be the number one hardcore box in the market. The design decision for Kinect was quite explicit: to have a portfolio at launch that showcased content that appeals to everyone.   As we move forward, you&amp;#039;re going to see that portfolio diversify and you&amp;#039;re going to see us show range.  Other Microsoft executivesCEO Steve Balmer and Dennis Durkin, COO of Microsoft Corp.&amp;#039;s Interactive Entertainment Business, for examplehave said they see this technology moving beyond gaming. Why start with an entertainment console? Well, we focus on the living roomgaming, watching movies, enjoying sports and connecting with your friendsbecause the living room is where we can tell the most immersive stories and where people are spending the majority of their time when they want to be entertained. Start in another place, and you lose part of the magic. I do see this as much broader than just entertainment. Moving from an old world, where you have to understand technology, to a new world, where technology understands us, is a computer-industry-wide move. But, to be able to bring something this transformational to market, you need focus. You need to pick a place to start. Also, maybe it just so happens that the people who believe in this future are all in our entertainment division. With Kinect, we&amp;#039;re just at the beginning of a journey, not the end. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a6234/how-microsoft-kinect-was-made/>