I recently went to a presentation at the local Atlanta.NET Users’ Group on the Microsoft Kinect. The device has been one of the fastest selling game devices in history (a Guinness World Record for selling 8 million units in the first 60
I recently went to a presentation at the local Atlanta.NET Users’ Group on the Microsoft Kinect. The device has been one of the fastest selling game devices in history (a Guinness World Record for selling 8 million units in the first 60 days). The technology behind the device is based on machine learning algorithms.
The word “hacking” is actually inaccurate since Microsoft has been encouraging people to develop drivers. Kinect has a USB port, which allows the machine to be used with a regular computer. Nevertheless, there’s something edgy and dangerous about using the word “hacking” and when people talk about Kinect “development” (a comparatively boring and commercial word) the “hacking” term is sticking. I believe the gaming community likes the word “hacking”.
I see that the slides for the presentation I saw in March 2011 are not posted online. Thus, in this blog post I will have some comments on the device and some links to video. I will not be talking about the Kinect as a consumer game device, but I will have a link where you can explore that topic on your own.
See this video first:
The machine learning algorithm behind the Kinect is the decision tree. In an article on this topic, they talk about randomized decision trees and forests. A forest is a group of decision trees, each of which may or may not be randomly gener