Kinected Browser Lets You Flick Through Websites 46
mikejuk writes "The Kinect is well supported by a good and evolving SDK on the desktop, but until now using it in a browser wasn't easy. Now Microsoft Research has a free JavaScript API, Kinected Browser, that lets you integrate the Kinect with HTML. The bad news is that it only works on Windows 7 and 8 and in desktop mode only. In addition the browser has to be IE9 or IE 10. The good news is that more programmers know how to do HTML5 graphics than know how to work with DirectX or .NET. As a result this could lead to another burst of innovative Kinect applications."
Re:To limited an Audience (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:To limited an Audience (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not changing for me. And I think "Many people who develop for Windows 8" is rather wishful thinking. If you're going to write an HTML/Javascript app, why not make it entirely cross platform?
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Having it be a pure web app is one possibility yes, but it's possible to write HTML5 apps for iOS and Android. I'm not saying that it will necessarily be better than developing a native app for each platform, but it does cut down on development effort for simpler apps. Facebook obviously decided recently that they're better off doing native apps (though when you have the resources they do, I'm not sure why they went HTML5 in the first place).
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I'm sure their intention was to allow enterprises to develop applications for and using IE6, but it ended honorably for everyone and was the reason IE6 ended up hanging on for so long past it's expiry.
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slowly getting their reputation as a credible browser vendor back
When was it ever credible?
It was most popular due to a lack of choices. Now that there are choices, I don't see many giving Microsoft a "second chance" - especially Web developers who have been burned for years by IE incompatibility with standards.
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When was it ever credible?
Perhaps you are a bit young to remember but in the early days of the browser Internet Explorer was like a breath of fresh air compared to the main opposition, Netscape Navigator. Netscape was a bloated mess that was getting worse with each new version. For every daft extension of the HTML language in IE (eg. MARQUEE), Netscape had its own (eg. Layers).
In those days, IE was indeed a credible browser. Where they really stuffed up was when they introduced ActiveX, and made it enabled by default (especially to
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Yeah, ignoring 20% of your customer base is always good business practice. What a great idea to ignore hundreds of millions of users solely because of their choice of browser. That extra 15 minutes it takes to make a website work with IE really will save you in the long run. Any programmer that can't make a website work on IE isn't worth their salt.
Re:To limited an Audience (Score:5, Informative)
Web apps, epically those that require javascript, can be very complex and supporting IE 6, 7 is not trivial for larger applications. IE 8 is not so bad, but still requires effort. IE 9 is better, I'm hoping IE 10 will get it right and I won't be required to code for everything, then re-code for IE. Although I'll still have to make modifications for IE 8 and 9
I can develop an application in Firefox and with no additional effort it'll work in Opera, Chrome and Safari, but the same application without modification will not work in IE 6 or 7, sometimes not in IE 8 and on more rare occasions not in IE 9. No web developer will agree supporting IE only takes an extra 15 minutes, unless they only support IE and even then there can still significant effort involved in porting to the other versions of IE. I've had clients tell me not to worry about IE once I told them what effort would be involved in porting a large application. Of course we try to support as many users as we can, but sometimes the amount of effort to grab that extra 20% just isn't worth spending double or triple the effort in development and testing.
Feel free to tell me to get off your lawn.
You know what works even better? A mouse. (Score:2)
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And mouse gesturing has been a feature of, at least, the Opera browser some time.
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Add-ons for it existed in firefox for ages as well, mostly mimicking opera functionality and adding stuff on top of it.
It's not that popular of a feature though, mostly because mouse with point and click is just that good of a controller scheme. It allows minimal motion to control wide variety of input.
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I can flick through websites using the scroll wheel with minimal effort.
If you look through the naysayer messages here, they all say the same thing: "I don't need it, therefore it shouldn't exist."
This is not meant to replace the mouse, but can be used where a mouse is the inferior interface. My aunt finds it difficult and painful to use a mouse these days due to here worsening arthritis. She would gladly try any new interface that means she doesn't have to grip a mouse.
Surgeons are trying out the Kinect to use computers during operations. A presenter could control a projected
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I can flick through websites using the scroll wheel with minimal effort. I don't feel like waving my hands to do common tasks.
Oh but you can talk as well. I suppose this would work at home but in the Office? I think it won't be long before signs saying "shush!" are common otherwise few people could get any work done. Now a telepathic interface would be more useful except for the migrains :)
But .... HOW WILL IT KNOW!! (Score:2, Funny)
How is the browser going to know when I need to switch hands, and use my other one for .... navigating.
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Well, I believe the Kinect has a microphone. Perhaps it will KNOW by looking for certain ... vocalizations.
Even better (Score:1)
good news (Score:1)
The bad news is that you are going to die, no matter what. The good news is that if you survive (no chance) you can have as much cake as you want!
No actual useful gestures shown (Score:1)
not all sites (Score:3)
Better Mousetrap (Score:2)
Re:Better Mousetrap (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm the founder of Zigfu. We support both Kinect SDK and OpenNI with our browser plugin so we can run on both PC and Mac. Zigfu also runs in IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari because we built our plugin both as an ActiveX and NPAPI plugin. Our QA matrix is nasty.
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What I don't understand is why anyone thinks that people want to trade control of a TV or computer by a simple twitch of a single finger for dancing around and wild gesticulations.
'Cause they grew up watching CSI and thought 'wow, that's really cool' without ever realising that CSI is a TV show.
They probably also say 'enhance, enhance' to their PC when they download a grainy pr0n picture.
why? (Score:2)
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - Ian Malcolm
I get why people do maybe-foolish things, when the envisioned result is something cool like dinosaurs. Why do people do things when the best-case scenario is something, which is orders of magnitude lamer than the status quo?
Guys, we already have MICE. WTF is the point of using a kinect for a job like this? Are you saying some day you'll get it perceiving precisely enough that it'll
Too bad the Xbox browser sucks (Score:1)
Oh WTF (Score:2)
The website I was looking at kept scrolling up and down... and up and down... and up and down... oh wait, um... nevermind.
This would only really be useful (Score:1)
....if the Javascript API is able to be implemented in future versions of other browsers. Otherwise it's really just a gimmick. Vendor lock-in doesn't really work in the browser world anymore, like it did with the older versions of IE.
Developers are going to want something that works in all major browsers, to get the biggest possible target audience....hence we have things like HTML & CSS standards and javascript frameworks (to handle the deficiencies / differences behind the scenes) that give a certa
like to see other kinect software (Score:1)
1.) make a really good and fast SLAM programm on windows I don't have to compile myself (like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o3ABX7xYJU [youtube.com] ) and extract a real 3d model (extract, convert and compress the point cloud to textured 3d).
2.) while beeing on this job it would be really nice to have a drag-and-drop photogrammetrie application without uploading all my pics to autodesks 123catch or microsofts photosynth.