The other day we told you about the rumors about Microsoft’s Wii-killing, motion-sensing Xbox 360 add-on set to debut at E3. Well, now Ars Technica thinks they’ve played with it a full year ago. Ars thinks that the new Xbox 360 motion sensing system is based on the ZCam 3D camera, made by a company that was later purchased by Microsoft.
If true, it sounds good. Ars was impressed with the tech when they got a hands-on with it back in January of 2008. And Microsoft has had a long time to work with it, so chances are it’s even better now. It makes sense to us, but we’ll have to wait and see what’s what when E3 arrives next month.
Is it a Wii-killer? Doubtful, but until we actually have some concrete info, no one knows for sure.
[Ars Technica] VIA [Gizmodo]
TAGS:
motion-sensing, system, tech, xbox 360, ZCam
The technique behind the zcam (and other motion sensing webcams) are not really useful for games. you need a plain background and no other person is allowed to move in the camera sight than the player.
The Zcam tech is alot more advanced than that, it can regonise individual finger movement and of the video I saw it showed a guy playing a game and his mate popped his head into the screen and it didn’t affect his play. I so hope this comes out, not just for gaming but the ability to select your videos and music with just using finger gestures would kick ass
The zcam used infrared time of flight(sort of) did 3d sensing at the pixel level gave you depth basically useing the depth map to pic out whats closer to camera like hands head etc over the background not motion detection its actually getting 3d distance for every pixel in the image so makes it much easier to distinguish foreground from background. I’ve had one for a while to do some testing for other applications.
Thought they sort of dropped off the face of the earth.