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Comment by DaveMebs | Hacker News Reader

There are going to be plenty of things that come out of MS Research that people don't realize came from there (examples: PhotoSynth, Kinect). Expecting an exhaustive list is unrealistic. Furthermore, MS Research was founded over a decade ago when patent trolling was not as big a deal. It's pretty clear if you read about it that Bill Gates wanted to create the successor to the great post-war corporate research groups (ex: Bell Labs). I find the idea that Gates would really aspire to create a patent troll when there are much more exciting things to do with 1000 phds.

(Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but now MS Research)

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... and you also get stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC28cXWqLc

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is really cool. The thing is that the 80's midi background track was just a terrible way to implement it.

ummm ... didnt Photosynth come from the SeaDragon acquisition and Kinect came from the PrimeSense partnership ?

OTOH, I think .NET/Mono are awesome pieces of language innovation.

EDIT: oops - didnt see that this was mentioned below.

Well, Kinect owes quite alot to PrimeSense so I certainly wouldn't categorize it as a 'MS Research' product.

Balance. In seeking to lift one group you cast aside another hard working group of people. Certainly PrimeSense contributed much, but to discount the hard work of those in MS Research as something less by wrapping them in quotes only serves to despoil your message. You commit that which you wish to redress.

See what Johnny Chung Lee said of his time there for a more balanced look of the records.

Ehh, given how much Kinect relies on the functionality offered by PrimeSense, I'd think it would rather be UNBALANCED to claim it to come from MS Research.

The Kinect only relies on Prime Sense in the form of their hardware. All the algorithms and software are entirely developed by MS Research. This point is made more clear by the fact that Microsoft didn't acquire exclusive rights from Prime Sense but is instead banking on the superiority of their algorithms.

I've played around with the Kinect, and without Microsoft's code, all you really get from the hardware is a depth image (think an RGB image with distance from camera for each pixel instead of intensity). Everything else is developed by Microsoft, and it is not an easy feat.

Prime Sense developed their own software for pose detection and tracking, but it is inferior to the XBox360 implementation.

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