The MIT Media Lab team has manipulated the visual abilities of Xbox 360 Kinect to allow people to use it for business teleconferencing purposes. Media Lab has also altered the detecting depth of the video feed back to make the whole experience way more interactive. This will allow people to use Kinect for fun or business in a whole new way.
The Kinect is an innovative accessory for Xbox 360, which allows people to control video game elements through their body movements. Microsoft has spent years in development of Kinect and has implemented some of the most advanced technology in to it. Up until now, the Kinect has been strictly used for gaming.
A technology team at MIT Media Lab has untapped some of the hidden resources from Kinect’s hardware. Since Kinect has human limb detection, it was easy for the team to switch it to object detection. This allowed to show movement and distance between presented objects. They were also able to blur people out of the video, so that the focus is only on the speaker. (See video)
This creates the effect of actually being there, since even the person on the other side can also rearrange objects to get real time feedback from the main screen.
Therefore more teleconferencing can be held across long distances and will cut down on travel time, expenses and more importantly green house emissions.
When considering all of the video chatting being used in business, this kind of technology will probably become main stream fairly quickly.
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