Microsoft now says it’s “inspired’ by community finding new uses for Kinect | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft now says it’s “inspired’ by community finding new uses for Kinect

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46 pointsth0ma532 comments

Microsoft is not a monolithic entity. People in different parts of the company have legitimately different agendas, which is also a source of lots of Microsoft's problems. I have no reason to doubt that that Alex Kipman and Shannon Loftis were being completely genuine, but it also wouldn't surprise me if MS' legal department tried legal action later on anyway. In a company with stronger leadership at the top, you might see a more consistent response (or at least a clear break when policies change), but I wouldn't expect that from MS.

Just to preempt the "damned if they do, damned if they don't" type of comments that usually follow something like this, I'd like to say: "Thank you, Microsoft, for doing the right thing. Next time, try to keep your lawyers away from your press office so their frothing at the mouth can be contained before you can craft a competent response."

I think its all how you present it, they just went along as they had never had said any of the previous statements. If they said sorry we made a mistake, I'm sure there would be a lot more praise for Microsoft.

God forbid they actually open-source their own drivers, and save the community a shitload of work, if this is so magically inspiring for them.

I'm quite happy with them never releasing the drivers as long as they don't do extra work to prevent hackability.

1. It may take as many man-hours for MS to clean up their drivers for open source consumption as it takes the community to hack bits together.

2. By hacking away from scratch the community is free to explore new ideas that Microsoft hasn't even imagined, whereas the existing drivers will likely be limiting.

In all fairness, Microsoft spent years buying up every major researcher in artificial vision and many other fields(to the point that Universities started complaining)and spent tens of millions developing this tech. It's something that Sony and Nintendo won't be able to duplicate without lots of money and at least another few years of R&D.

I mean sure things can be reverse engineered, but open sourcing this would instantly put Sony and Nintendo in a position to simply make their own hardware and call it a day. I'd love to see the drivers open sourced, because that's where the really interesting things are going on... but that's simply not realistically going to happen.

Microsoft really moved the field forward on this one, I completely understand their desire to make some of that money back.

Sony already released their "Move" system, which many argue is better than Kinect..

In all likelihood I'm just putting my own ignorance on display, but I'd never heard of Move before the Kinect came out.

Disclaimer: I'm Canadian. XBox won up here.

Uhm, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Move work on completely different principles?

I mean, I thought the point of move was the six axis accelerometer combined with the sensor picking up the ball of light?

Much of the "magic" of Kinect is performed inside the Kinect, so open drivers still require you to buy a Kinect.

save the community a shitload of work

Even in the parallel universe in which Microsoft has this obligation it is fulfilled many times over by making the product in the first place.

I think it's a difference in perspective. The Microsoft XBox 360 teams hears "We want to hack the Kinect" and pretty much leaps to "We wish to see if we can somehow exploit the Kinect to crack the box wide open and make game piracy possible." It really doesn't hurt Microsoft much for you to plug your Kinect into your (statistically-probably Windows) PC and use it without modification, and once they worked out that's what was happening they probably simmered down a lot. Given the novelty of the Kinect, I would think their optimal strategy would be to encourage Kinect experimentation to the utmost; the faster the "hackers" discover great, compelling ways to use the Kinect, the faster Microsoft can productize them.

But they'll still come down like a bag of bricks on anybody who manages to crack XBox security with one.

Very interesting point. Of course, it begs the question : If Microsoft was so alert to the potential for the Kinect to be hacked, does that mean that there's a potential way to crack XBox security embedded in the Kinect? There has to be a reason for their narrow-minded initial legal response.

I would guess that Kinect, unlike most peripherals, but like most consoles, is sold at or below cost and the profit is made in games sales. If people can use Kinect without buying any games, they reduce the amount of profit Microsoft is able to bring into an already low margin area of their company.

But that also feeds the buzz about the product, which is useful given Microsoft's lack of nerd cred lately.

And some portion of people buying a Kinect for hacks will end up buying an Xbox and games, as well, for when they're not hacking, or for the kids, or whatever.

After all, if they're interested in the Kinect, they'll likely be interested in trying other peoples' applications of the technology - which may include Xbox games.

There's an important distinction between people "modifying the Kinect" and people writing drivers that let other devices USE the Kinect.

Not saying that the first one should still be banned, but I think this new announcement is more of a clarification that they're okay with people writing drivers and using it for puppets/roombas/their own purposes, as long as their not hacking the Kinect itself.

Unless they release full-featured, official drivers, how do they think such drivers get written?

USBus snooping?

They should take back that public statement about getting law enforcement involved, then. Sure, they say they are "inspired" but it still stands that they will ask the government to throw you in jail if you hack around with the Kinect.

This PR is bullshit until they open up and say they won't try their hardest to send you to jail.

I'm sure they are "inspired" by the interest in this device. I'd never buy an Xbox, but I'd get one of these just to hook it up to my computer and play around. Why would they not want to take my money?

Because they're probably losing money on the hardware.

How much do they lose if it just sits on the shelf?

The premise of this question is likely wrong, but in an enlightening way: The Kinect looks poised to be a big hit this holiday season, which is to say "over the next thirty days". There may well not be enough inventory to meet demand, and every Kinect that is bought by a hacker is a Kinect that doesn't also serve to drive the sale of XBox hardware and XBox games during the peak game-buying season of the year.

They moved 1 million units in the first 10 days. Apparently on track for 5 million before year's end.

Very unlikely in the long term. As millions of these get built, cost will come down.

Total aside, the resistor turing test at the bottom of the page was awesome.

That is all.

While taking their own words back is stupid, why not open-source the platform? They're selling kinect with positive margin and with open platform they will do even more.

Because then Sony and Nintendo could simply make their own hardware and use the drivers with it. The most interesting bits of Kinect aren't in the hardware... they're in the software, and Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars and quite a few years developing it.

They don't need to open their analysis, they just need to open the interface for the device itself -- the work the community has already partially done. It'll happen eventually anyway (soon, most likely), so it has a minimal downside for them.

The OpenKinect project has achieved a lot in the last week.

https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect/

http://groups.google.com/group/openkinect

Wouldn't be surprised if new official applications of the Kinect come directly from observing what the most popular hacked applications are.

full transcript (thanks Miguel) http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/microsoft-kinect-no...

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