Kinect: the backstory

Network World covered Craig Mundie’s talk at our Financial Analyst Meeting last week and zoned in on the Kinect discussion. As we looked at the Wii and thought about removing the controller entirely from gaming people in our XBOX team initially thought it couldn't be done. “They concluded it was impossible. It wasn't going to work," Craig said.

That was until they spoke with the folks in Microsoft Research. Too often I get asked what do those folks in MSR do? Where do we spend that money? In fields such as depth sensing, machine learning, speech recognition, gestural interface, computer vision, identity recognition, sound processing and parallel computing I reply (well, I don’t really say that as they’d typically nod off) but you get the idea. As it turns out, those are all the things you need to bring a controller-less gaming unit to market in the shape of Kinect.

When it comes out in November and people ask me what do MSR do, I can point to Kinect and say “that’s one of the things…”. There are a tonne of other things do they do course but in terms of something people can touch (ahem), this is set to be a very fine example.

See the full details of Craig’s session in Webcast, Transcript(29KB) and Presentation(3MB)