Louise Marston - 16.01.2012
At a recent NESTA event, Matt Jones described Microsoft's X-box Kinect product as "military-grade surveillance".
Kinect does very sophisticated visual analysis, interpreting a picture of your body to work out where your hands, feet and head are, and uses this to control X-box games. It knows if you move towards and away from it, as well as side to side, and can distinguish more than one player.
You would expect this sort of 'high tech' to come out of advanced computing laboratories at universities like Cambridge and MIT. And you'd be right. But that's not the whole story.
Microsoft has a large and influential research function, closely connected to universities, which publishes a great deal of original research. Speaking at the UK-IRC Innovation Summit in November, Andrew Fitzgibbon from Microsoft Research in Cambridge described the role they played in developing Kinect. The Kinect business group in Seattle had seen a paper published by the Cambridge team, and asked them to help build a system to track the human body from images. The research team advised them, based on years of study on computer vision, that they were asking for the impossible. It couldn't be done fast enough, it required too many calculations to be done in real time.
No, no, no, the Kinect product team said - we've already built the thing, and it's working. We just need your help to improve it. Later, a film computer graphics company was brought in to the collaboration, creating hundreds of human pose images to train the system to recognise every possible configuration of the human body.
The story of Kinect brings together two common stories about technology development: that it comes from research and academic study, and propagates out; and that it's all about studying users, and designing what will delight them. The example of Kinect illustrates that you need both (and usually many more components as well). You need the research, the detailed study of what works and how. But you also need to connect that to those who can see the needs and opportunities, and just try something out.
When we think of 'technology' as being pushed out of laboratories, or pulled along by the voracious suck of the market, we are missing the biggest piece of the puzzle: the connections and collaborations that bring together existing work and knowledge in new and surprising combinations. All of those are built on human relationships, and we are much further away from working out how to influence these than we are in the study of university knowledge transfer or venture capital.
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mimetics
19 Jan 12, 6:38pm (1 years ago)
Nesta funded precursor to Kinect in 2005?
In 2005 Nesta funded a co-development project with Scottish based Ice Robotics and mimetics who employed freelance 3D vision specialist Peter Hillman to prototype a stereoscopic camera system for gaming!
A short video of the prototype demonstrating a 3D rag doll figure following the movements of a human operator can be seen here: http://vimeo.com/35329036
Quote from the original Nesta project proposal 5/5/2004:
"Stereo vision systems are relatively new and are unique in that they enable computers to see in three dimensions. The project is both novel and innovative through combining this cutting edge technology with the real-time 3D computer graphics of mimesia to produce a naturally immersive 3D visual system.
The project is a prototype for naturally interactive 3D systems with potential applications beyond that of interactive art. We believe that such natural interaction systems are the way forwards in future interaction with technologies."
According to wikipedia the Kinect was invented in 2005, prior to this in 2003 IceRobotics had produced a stereoscopic camera system for the automated milking of cows.
http://www.vision-systems.com/articles/print/volume-8/issue-7/technology-trends/systems-integration/robotics-heralds-new-era-in-dairy-farming.html
We used the IceRobotics hardware as a basis for our prototype and put forward to Nesta that the system could be developed to create a new and novel inerface for gaming, health and fitness.
As often with innovative UK ideas where a market is not yet in existence, the commercial team at Nesta were not convinced that the project had any real commercial application and the project was not developed further, despite Nesta seeking advice from UK games guru Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, who later worked closely on the Kinect project.
However even given further funding from Nesta I cannot imagine we could have competed with the might of Microsoft with its vast financial, technical and marketing resources.
I imagine there must be other tales of innovation failure lurking within the history of Nesta and perhaps these may offer valuable insights on how the UK might succesfully capitalise on its genius of inventing?