
Microsoft creates Kinect-like system using your laptop speaker & microphone - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/128735-microsoft-creates-kinect-like-system-using-your-laptops-built-in-speaker-microphone
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aw3c2
If you would like to avoid extremetech, go directly to the source:
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/redmond/groups/cue/so...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/redmond/groups/cue/soundwave/)

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JabavuAdams
> The Doppler effect, if you remember high school physics, is where the
> frequency of a sound alters depending on your distance from it [...]

Wat!? Is there no hope for science reporting?

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electromagnetic
There's no history for any reporting. It's always someone whose speciality is
anything but the subject they're reporting on, because their speciality is
journalism.

This is likely written by a guy who wanted to be a journalist, and liked all
those gadgets he got to play with so when he couldn't get hired at a real
journalism job, he went to a job he thought he'd get to report on all those
cool gadgets and toys he loves, but the pay is utter shit (as most journalism
jobs are) so he doesn't have time to fact check his own work. He's not at a
major publication so it doesn't get read by an actual fact checker. And the
editor likely gives it a 30 second look for any glaring formatting errors and
rubber stamps it.

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pilom
While I can't hear above 16KHz, lots of people can hear up to 20KHz without
any trouble. To them this would sound like the highest pitch ringing you could
imagine. And don't let any dogs in the room, this would be a continuous dog
whistle to them. Very annoying.

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anigbrowl
Yeah, I would have a real problem with this. I can't be around those sonic
rodent repellers or anything similar.

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electromagnetic
The ironic thing is I can hear those sonic rodent repellers at the very top of
my hearing range, yet my dogs are completely not bothered by it. Neither are
my friends dogs, one actually goes and sleeps by the one in my living room (I
don't believe the devices work, but I have yet to have a reason to bend down
and remove it since I moved in).

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huxley
Sounds pretty neat but I find it hard to be excited since the times I've used
Kinect itself, it was actually pretty annoying.

Perhaps it was the setup or something about the room, but I found the response
rate slow and the accuracy terrible.

Though maybe combining the two approaches would improve the experience for
more conditions and situations.

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rralian
I agree with this, but it seems to be a software issue in the games
themselves. When I view the little stick figure version of me during
calibration, that tracks my movements extremely well. So I would expect the
games to get better and better as the devs iterate.

Side-note: I really need higher ceilings in my family room. I nearly knocked
myself out jumping into the ceiling once. Once.

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mjb
This kind of little speaker-microphone 'sonar' is the kind of project we would
give to undergraduate students as an afternoon practical. It's simple stuff to
get going. The real magic that would make this useful is the signal processing
and tracking algorithms which turn the extremely inaccurate raw data into
something that provides a good user experience.

A few kHz (the gap between what the speakers can do and human hearing) isn't
much bandwidth, so this system is going to be highly affected by the tradeoff
between range accuracy and Doppler accuracy. If they are attempting to do
bistatic (two transmitters) tricks to derive spatial position, then this
information will be similarly inaccurate.

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yummybear
I would imagine that most of the real magic will lie in making it work, and
work well, as an input method - the video makes it look painfully awkward to
use. Even Kinect which works relatively precisely is extremely annoying for
anything else than kicking balls around on a screen. Even without
interruptions like your children walking in front of the TV, getting Kinect to
register an interaction correctly is a process of carefully performing some
strange gesture like a wizard executing a spell while on LSD, and then doing
it 5 more times until Kinect deems it precise enough. Personally I don't
imagine this becoming more precise in the near future than to be useful for
perhaps turning pages on a reader or tablet.

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pepijndevos
It looks like this system has absolutely no idea in which direction your hand
is moving. Just the speed towards the mic.

Note how they do tetris by fast and slow tapping, and use tapping to reverse
the scroll direction.

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diminish
interesting attempt with mic, but wouldnt it be easier to make the kinect
cheaper and smaller and embed it in computers or sell it as a smaller unit?

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drzaiusapelord
Yeah, this looks like a step back. I remember reading about Win8 and how its
going to integrated with Kinect and how OEMs like Lenovo were already building
"Kinect lites" that could fit in a laptop. I wonder what happened to that.

Everything about Kinect on PC is a bit underwhelming. I really don't want to
wave at the thing a few inches from me, but I'd love to have it be able to
track my eyeballs and be able to click or run macros via lifting fingers,
blinking, or moving my jaw. We may be a year or two away from some really
exotic UIs.

Kinect for media center looks pretty promising. I have a windows mediapc
running windows 7 and am tempted to buy the PC version of the kinect just to
control everything via gestures.

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Hrundi
I wouldn't call it a step back. That sounds rather pessimistic. It looks like
an experiment, like many great things that come out of Microsoft's research.

The Computer Vision field has certainly gotten far with head-tracking and
object recognition.

With a bunch of relatively simple code, you can have a piece of software that
tracks your jaw and blinking gestures with a cheap webcam and run whatever
macros you choose.

I'm not sure about eyeball following, it depends on the camera's resolution
and how much you train the program.

I have myself experimented with head-tracking to replace mouse-look in FPS
games. It is very fun to try, save for an eventual headache in Quake 3's
Q3DM17 :)

Now, these kinds of experiments are not for the average consumer, but they
have been simplified so much over the last few years that the amount of
excuses for not trying it out is decreasing.

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calebmpeterson
Could you please provide a little more detail; specifically the "blink
gestures"? What libraries, any papers and/or online tutorials? A quick DDG
search turned up only one paper from Princeton dating back to Fall '08. Thank
you.

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radarsat1
Wonder if it could be combined with more typical ultrasound measurement
techniques (time-of-flight, amplitude) to get distance -- combine this with
Doppler-derived velocity using a Kalman filter, use stereo microphones for
reception, two speakers emitting slightly different frequencies for left-right
disambiguation, and you could probably get pretty good absolute measurements.

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username3
Related: <http://iqtainment.wordpress.com/acoustic-ruler/>

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jcromartie
Cool hack, but why would I want to wave my hands at my laptop? Maybe my
imagination is too limited...

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Edootjuh
I can think of a few examples. Controlling your music player while in another
program. For Wii-like games but also for example for making signals to
teammates in FPSs. As the article said, presense detection. Perhaps for
desktop switching to free up screen real-estate.

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kijin
All of those things except presence detection can be done by tapping one key
or another. For example, most computers have keys for controlling music
players, they're just not integrated properly. As the article says, it feels a
bit silly to wave you hand in front of the screen what you can just move your
finger a couple of inches from whatever you were doing and achieve the same
result with a lot less energy.

If we worked like Tom Cruise does in _The Minority Report_ , we'd have a far
bigger problem than carpal tunnel syndrome.

But maybe we could use something like this to bring mouseover effects back to
tablet computers? Hover your finger above a button and watch it spin before
you tap it!

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archivator
Doesn't Doppler calculation assume that the microphone and speaker are
practically the same device (same point in space?). I reckon very few laptops
have a setup like that..

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zerohp
No, it makes no such assumption. It's about motion and uses velocity, not
position.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect#General>

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jayklub
Didn't Morgan Freeman create this circa 2008?

