Wow, great find Istran. Cool stuff!

Probably the most impressive use for it I’ve seen yet. Opens up a lot of possibilities.

Wow… Imagine a virtual world where everyone controls their own avatars in this way. A Kinect MMO is now a MUST and would be such a big hit. I really would like to see MS get agressive and use this type of application on XBox with Kinect. It’s demos such as these that get me all pumped up for the future. The problem though is I don’t want to wait 1-2 years for this stuff. Get on it MS!!!

Are you sure it was made with Kinect?? Youtube’s site of those guys doesn’t mention Kinect

From Activate3D’s website: http://activate3d.com/2010/11/how-are-we-different-than-kinect/

“If you stuck with us this long, hopefully you now see how compelling our mix of physics, user motion, and example motions can be and how ICM can enable even more immersive games on Kinect.

We thought that we’d leave you with a video of our obstacle course, showing off some experiences that you haven’t seen in a Kinect title.”

In other words, their software may be better than Microsoft’s at this point. But they use Kinect to get the info.

“Our technology builds on top of the Kinect experience by: Retargetting the Kinect skeleton to match the in-game avatar” – from the same website

Hopefully that’ll give you an idea on what Kinect is capable of through software updates

Thanks Clemens! I didn’t see their public website, just the youtube’s one. It’s my understanding they are programming a new set of drivers and api to process Kinect output data.
Obviously they are doing a great job “tunning” kinect, I’m looking forward to seeing this kind of thing running in my Kinect applied to my favourite games.

Not a problem at all, Jesus. In my view, this shows the potential of the software component in Kinect. Hardware wise it’s up to snuff . Although already an amazing device, it can do so much more with just another SDK for example. Cool stuff IMO!

Great video, but I was a bit disappointed the article’s pic had nothing to do with it, lol!

they’re using the standard hacking OpenNI drivers as well as the official PrimeSense drivers

from the website:
Support for multiple skeleton SDKs.
* OpenNI and NITE from PrimeSense
* Iisu from Softkinetic
* Shadow from Omek Interactive

It seems they’re pitching middleware like Epic’s Unreal engine, but for motion systems. Sounds great. Maybe someone will use their software. But so far, companies are either using their own engine on top of Microsoft’s engine (like Harmonix or Blitz) or just purely using MS’s engine (MS).

It’s exciting to see the feedback and enthusiasm from everyone. We hope this software gets used for great games as well.

I figured I’d add a couple of points.

-That particular video was made a few months ago on a PrimeSensor not a Kinect camera. The PrimeSensor has the same tech specs, but we didn’t have Kinect support at the time. It can all run on Kinect today.
-We are producing a product for sale to game developers that interprets motion data and integrates it with virtual worlds. It’s called Intelligent Character Motion, and it’s available to game developers now!
-We’ve got a free community edition of Intelligent Character Motion that we’ll be officially announcing later this week. (It’s in limited release now.) If you’re working on a non-commercial project/Kinect hack, you’ll be able to download it and check things out.

Again, we’re excited to see all the enthusiasm. Please keep an eye on our blog for more exciting stuff in the future, and let us know if you have questions.

Dan Amerson
VP, Engineering, Activate3D

Thanks for taking the time to explain this to us, Dan. Great to see what you guys are pulling off using Kinect’s technology!

Some more questions regarding your products:
Is your software similar to BlitzTech’s middleware solution for Kinect software/game developers, or is that very different from your proposition?

Are you mostly focused on improving the interpretation of motions with Kinect, or also trying to improve the voice-recognition side of the Kinect Sensor?

Activate3D is dedicated to creating believable characters in virtual worlds. To that end, we’re really focused on interpreting motion and the technologies around that. We aren’t actively working on any voice-recognition technology at this time.

It’s hard for me to say how near or far we are from Blitz. I haven’t been able to find a good description of their Kinect-specific features online. I only recall reading somewhere that they developed technology to support skeletons in the prone position for The Biggest Loser game. To that end, we’re a bit different. We interpret the skeletal information; we don’t compute it directly.

Blitz is certainly developing technology to license which is the same business model we have. However, we may be (and likely are) developing dramatically different features.

dba