Sitting in a developer conference and Microsoft just announced KAIT, a pretty sweet Kinect toolkit.
We are the first audience in the world to hear about it and immediately following this session it will be available for download on GitHub.
what’s that?
+1
Well, after watching the whole presentation it doesn’t have a lot of usefulness in gaming probably, but may in the future. It’s a toolkit that works with Kinect and Azure and NEC’s biometrics algorithms. If you were using Unity to build storefront type stuff it would be pretty neat, thought you couldn’t support it with .NET 3.5 I don’t think because of some of the stream processing and blocking collections.
Anywho, so it’s a toolkit available on GitHub with a GUI. It can do facial / player recognition, and it doesn’t focus on skeletal tracking. Instead, it focuses on engagement. And does or will do multi player tracking. How close is the player? Is the player facing the camera? And using the biometrics is can guess the player’s gender and age range.
It all works by sending telemetry data to Azure and the demo was neat. They should how it could be used with a Fitbit display. The camera was able to detect how far the “shopper” was and start showing relevant information on the screen… advertisements. When he got closer it detected his gender and age range and showed the relevant fitbit size and color options. Then when he reached out and touched it, the screen changed to the correct Fitbit because through a little bit of initial calibration it can tell where the object is and detect when the person is touching it.
Also, when he turned is body to the side, the information went away and back to a splash screen because it can detect with the “player” is engaged, or looking in its direction. And, through Power BI, they were able to automatically determine when a customer was looking at or touching the item for longer than 15 seconds and automatically send a push notification to a Microsoft Band, telling a sales associate that a customer may need assistance with the product.