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2011

KINECT GETS FACIAL AVATAR

July 28, 2011 0

Facial Recognition is the latest addition which has been released by the Microsoft, which will enhance the ability of Xbox 360 to display accurately what one does. Xbox 360 is a gaming console out of the Microsoft warehouse. It is a feature which is highly anticipated and would be for Avatar Kinect, a device for motion capture.

There are a few more features in Avatar Kinect which surpass the functionality of Wii’s Mii, which has popped out of Nintendo’s warehouse. Avatar Kinect does not display a mocked imitation of one but allows full body capture which functions in a better way to recognize complete facials.

This motion capturing device of Microsoft has always been capable of capturing movements of one’s full body which has shown its potential to create dancing movements for dance games and similar stuffs for other motion sensing games. But attempting to capture facial movements of a person looks cheesy and is completely different from the normal motion sensing of one’s body movements.

Avatar Kinect would not only attempt to track one’s movements of their eyebrows, mouth and most importantly their head, but additionally would even display a dramaticimitation digitally of how they look like. This is one addition which is highly impressive. That is however not all. It even detects what one does while they are speaking. The device is however limited and would not track details such as sudden twisting and twirling of face or blinking.

A user would get options for the selection of their preferred avatar which currently sums up to 24 and the screening at a given point of time would be of 8 avatars. There are various environments which an be created by a user and one of them is the chat show style environment. This is an entertaining environment where people can come in as a group and have a group chat which would spice up their conversations too.

Microsoft celebrated the Avatar Kinect launch by tickling the funny bones of people. There were an Avatar Kinect Stand-Up Comedy Fest named comedy show was digitalized wherein a few comedians were given 90 seconds to act as funny as possible in front of the camera of Kinect. The Kinect camera later on performed the conversion of their comedy movements into this full fledged show. To lure the users, a contest was sported where they could vote for their favorite comedian and lucky winners would be given Kinect.

Earlier this year, the Software Giant came up with a promise that this device would in the coming future even detect minute movements of a user which would include an essential feature of tracking one’s individual joints. This feature would be really useful when games are played wherein every reaction of one’s joint can turn vital. Kinect Sparkler was even recently launched by Microsoft. This shows the movement of the hands. There was yet another announcement that the integration of this device to Kinect will be soon out even.

The first preview of this motion sensing device was in January at Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The date however wasn’t disclosed but it was hinted that the release date would be anywhere around the Spring. Nevertheless, its out now and looks wishfully tempting. Users of Xbox Live can use Avatar Kinect for free till 8th September, but after that one would need to have a gold account to make use of it.