CES 2012: Sesame Street Kinect shows promise of TV voice, gesture control [Video]

At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we saw a bit of a scramble by TV makers such as Samsung and LG to show off what they working on or releasing in the coming year that would allow us to control our TVs using voice, gesture and facial recognition.

Many technology pundits and analysts have said these sorts of announcements, which also took place at last year's CES, are in response to rumors that Apple is working on an "iTV" that will offer a new way of controlling a TV and maybe even how we pay for or watch channels and TV shows.

But as many video-game lovers out there know, TV voice recognition, gesture controls and facial recognition are already here in the form of Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing camera, which is an accessory to the Xbox 360 home gaming console.

However, Kinect is just getting started, and currently has a small number of apps. And it's still a device that sells for about $150 and requires an Xbox 360, which starts at $200. Make no mistake, there will be a cost of entry to the future of TV.

At CES 2012, Microsoft showed off a bit of what the future may hold for Kinect, the Xbox and TV with demonstrations of its latest Kinect-enabled app for the Xbox, called Sesame Street Kinect (you can see our demonstration of the app in a video atop this article).

Sesame Street Kinect is what it sounds like, episodes of the long-running children's program tailored to use the Kinect camera. And what Kinect can do is really impressive.

Since 1969, children around the world have sat in front of TVs repeating back the alphabet, colors, words and numbers to characters on Sesame Street (I did it when I was a child). Until Sesame Street Kinect, which is set to release later this year at an unannounced price, the characters on the screen couldn't respond to the viewer's actions. Now, to a limited extent, they can.

The demonstration we saw featured the Grover, Elmo and Cookie Monster characters prompting viewers to interact by either saying certain words or moving in certain ways.

For example, we took part in a demonstration in which Grover drops a box of coconuts and asks that the viewer pick them up and throw them back to him.

I f the viewer stands up and moves in the way that they would throw an imaginary coconut (don't throw a real coconut unless your trying to break your TV) then Grover catches each one in his box, even reacting to how hard the Kinect interprets the viewer's throw to be.

The experience was a lot of fun for a room of four adults, and I imagine kids will enjoy this sort of thing too. Jose Pinero, am Xbox spokesman, said a similarly interactive app from National Geographic is coming this year as well.

Although Microsoft has sold more than 66 million Xbox consoles and more than 18 million Kinect cameras, the tech giant realizes it has something bigger than just video games on its hands with Kinect.

Both Kinect and Xbox Live are headed to Windows 8 later this year. Hopefully, that will mean more interactive "two-way TV" apps like Sesame Street Kinect, and more apps related to media outlets such as ESPN and National Geographic.

There are also rumors that the company is working to get Kinect built directly into TVs, which would very likely place Xbox Live and Kinect in direct competition with Google TV and Apple's expected entry into the TV market. That's a living-room showdown I'd like to see.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles in Las Vegas

Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+

Twitter.com/nateog

Photos: Sesame Street Kinect in action. Credit: Armand Emamdjomeh / Los Angeles Times

CES 2012: Samsung tablet + Kinect + motorized skateboard = wear a helmet

Move over Segway, and make room on the road for the Board of Awesomeness.

Chaotic Moon Labs' Kinect-controlled motorized skateboard zoomed through the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, showcasing a quirky mashup of technologies -- one that hopefully won't end with the rider getting a mashed-up head.

By attaching a Samsung tablet to the Kinect, the Austin, Texas-based software laboratory set out to "make Kinect do everything it's not supposed to do," which includes helping accelerate a skateboard and its rider to 32 mph.

VIDEOS: 2012 Consumer Electronics Show

It did it by creating an electric skateboard with the Kinect as a built-in gesture sensor, so the rider can accelerate by pushing his hands forward, and slow down by pulling them back  -- a little bit like skateboarding with an invisible steering wheel.

The board has giant all-terrain tires, as well as an 800-watt electric motor, so you could probably skateboard up San Francisco's Lombard Street if you needed to. (Note to readers: Don't.)

The brain of the conveyance is a Samsung tablet powered by the new Windows 8 operating system, which you better hope doesn't crash -- because if it does ...

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CES 2012: Virtual dressing room eliminates need to take off your clothes

Remember Cher's virtual closet from "Clueless," the one that helped the fashionable teen choose her outfits by digitally placing the clothes on an image of her body? Now you can have a better version of it.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, a Calabasas company was giving demonstrations of Swivel, a real-time virtual dressing room that takes a lot of the hassle out of shopping -- no more long waits in the fitting room line loaded down with an armful of clothes, or the tedious process of getting dressed and undressed several times during one trip to the mall.

To use the Swivel system, which works by utilizing motion-sensing technology, stand a few feet in front of a webcam or Microsoft Kinect device. A live image of yourself will appear on a connected television or computer screen, along with a selection of categories like clothing, jewelry and handbags.

Select a category -- say, dresses -- by waving your hand over it. A lineup of gowns will appear on the right-hand panel; another wave of the arm selects the dress you want to try on and digitally overlays it over the live image of yourself.

Turn to the side and the dress will move with you; the product takes into account your unique body type, and items appear to be form-fitting. You can layer accessories onto the look by selecting necklaces and belts, or change the background image to a red carpet or city scene to put the look into context. The Swivel system also gives users outfit recommendations and enables them to send an image of the final look to their friends for approval.

FaceCake Marketing Technologies, which created Swivel using proprietary software, hopes the system will be used by retailers, in malls and at home.

FaceCake recently did a mall tour in Southern California to debut the system to shoppers. The average shopper tried on 66% of the items available, or about 45 products, far more than he or she would typically try on in a physical dressing room, said FaceCake Chief Executive Linda Smith.

"It's a virtual dressing room that makes things easy," she said during a demo for The Times at CES in Las Vegas. "It really puts the whole store in a little six-foot area."

With retailers' merchandise selections changing daily, Smith said the Swivel system would update its merchandise content regularly to give users the most up-to-date products. 

Swivel will be available later this year for consumers for in-home use and FaceCake is in discussions with a national mall operator to put Swivel in shopping centers, Smith said. A handful of retailers, including Banana Republic and Nordstrom, signed on for the mall tour, allowing their merchandise to be featured in the system.

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Kinect is coming to Windows, but are TVs next?

We've known for months that Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing camera technology would make its way to Windows. But now we also know that Kinect on Windows won't use the same hardware as Kinect for the Xbox 360 video game system.

"Since announcing a few weeks ago that the Kinect for Windows commercial program will launch in early 2012, we've been asked whether there will also be new Kinect hardware especially for Windows," Craig Eisler, the general manager of the Kinect for Windows team, wrote in a company blog post. "The answer is yes; building on the existing Kinect for Xbox 360 device, we have optimized certain hardware components and made firmware adjustments which better enable PC-centric scenarios."

Kinect for Windows will also get its own Software Development Kit to make use of the PC-specific hardware that will deliver features and capabilities unique to the stalwart operating system, Eisler said.

So how will the Kinect for Windows differ from the Xbox hardware?

"Simple changes include shortening the USB cable to ensure reliability across a broad range of computers and the inclusion of a small dongle to improve coexistence with other USB peripherals," he said. "Of particular interest to developers will be the new firmware which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device without losing accuracy or precision, with graceful degradation down to 40 centimeters."

With the new hardware being able to see people at a closer range, Kinect for Windows will be able to be used in a wider range of environments than the Kinect for Xbox, which was designed for living rooms with wide open spaces for people to jump and move around to play games without a controller.

This so-called Near Mode was "one of the most requested features from the many developers and companies participating in our Kinect for Windows pilot program and folks commenting on our forums, and we're pleased to deliver this, and more, at launch," Eisler said.

As to when Kinect for Windows will arrive in stores, Microsoft hasn't said just yet. The current Kinect for Windows SDK is built for Windows 7, but Windows 8 is set for release sometime next year.

But it seems that the company's ambition for Kinect might extend beyond the Xbox and PCs and into TVs, according to the News Corp.-owned digital magazine, the Daily.

"Sources familiar with the subject told the Daily that the tech giant wants to aggressively push the Kinect into as many living rooms as possible, even those without its Xbox 360 gaming systems," wrote Matt Hickey, a reporter for the Daily. "Microsoft is said to be in the early stages of licensing its Kinect technology to television hardware manufacturers like Vizio and Sony."

If Microsoft were to add its motion-sensing Kinect technology into TV sets, using gestures to control the TV rather than a remote, it would place the firm in competition with Google TV and Apple's rumored eventual entry into the TV market.

If this all plays out, our living rooms and our office spaces will probably get a lot more interesting (with a lot more waving hands and arms to be seen) in the next couple of years.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Children try out a video game that uses Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360 motion-sensing camera at a media event Oct. 18, 2011 in New York. Credit: Jason DeCrow / Associated Press Images for Microsoft

Barnes & Noble unveils Nook Tablet at $249 as Kindle Fire rival

The Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet was announced on Monday as the bookseller's answer to the coming Amazon Kindle Fire and Kobo Vox tablets.

The Nook Tablet is now on pre-order and will ship to Barnes & Noble stores and other retailers (Target, Staples, Wal-Mart, Office Max and many others) late next week at a price of $249 -- about $50 more than the Kindle Fire.

But for the extra $50, the Nook Tablet offers beefier specs than the Kindle Fire that, Chief Executive William Lynch argued in unveiling the new Barnes & Noble device will add up to a faster, smoother experience when reading books, playing games or watching movies.

So just what are those increased specs?

The Nook Tablet gets 16 gigabytes of built-in storage and 1 gigabyte of RAM. The Nook Color, which used to sell for $249 but was cut in price to $199 on Monday, has 8 gigabytes of storage and 512 megabytes of RAM.

Both Nook devices feature the same 7-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels and a microSD card slot that can accommodate up to 32-gigabytes of added storage.

The Kindle Fire features Nook-Color-matching specs with a 7-inch touch screen, a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, 8 gigabytes of built-in storage and 512-megabytes of RAM. Amazon's tablet has no microSD card slot.

The Nook Tablet will offer up to 11.5 hours of battery life, which beats the Kindle Fire's promise of an 8-hour battery life.

Each of the three tablets run on modified versions of Google's Android Gingerbread operating system and connect to the Internet over wi-fi, with no 3G or 4G options offered.  All three also make use of cloud storage, with the Nook Tablet and Nook Color syncing to the Nook Cloud service and the Kindle Fire using Amazon Cloud Drive.

Unlike the Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet and Nook Color have no built-in storefront for buying movies and music.

Lynch said that while Amazon sells those items, Barnes & Noble is focused on selling digital reading content, while letting others handle the music, TV show and film side of things -- such as Netflix, Hulu and Pandora which all come pre-installed on the Nook Tablet.

"The Kindle Fire is a vending machine for Amazon services, they've said it themselves," he said at the company's flagship store in New York's Union Square during the Nook Tablet reveal. "In one word, we're more open" in allowing users to get their music and video content from wherever they want.

Amazon, meanwhile, has marketed its services as a strength of the Kindle Fire and not a detractor.

As far as styling, the Nook Tablet looks exactly like the Nook Color, save for a different shade of gray paint adorning the face of the device. The single black bar home button and rounded hook on one corner remain in place, as does a soft-touch rubberized back.

Will the Nook Tablet and Nook Color combo be enough to stem Amazon's tablet domination plans? Tell us what you think in the comments.

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Photo: William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble, holds the new Nook Tablet at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York, on Nov. 7, 2011. Credit: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Microsoft releases Kinect for Windows SDK

Microsoft released a new Kinect for Windows software development kit on Thursday that works with the company's Windows 7 operating system.

The new Kinect for Windows SDK offers developers a set of tools to build applications and games for PCs using Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing controller, which launched for the Xbox 360 gaming console last November and has sold more than 10 million units so far.

"The Kinect for Windows SDK opens up a world of possibilities to developers," said Anoop Gupta, an engineer at Microsoft Research, in a statement. "We can't wait to see what this community will create as we work together to build more natural, intuitive computing experiences."

The developer SDK, which can be downloaded for free, follows Microsoft's February release of a Kinect for Windows SDK to academics, which also enabled the camera-equipped device to be used with PCs.

Already, some have used the Kinect to build various programs controlled by motion gestures and voice commands -- and the Kinect has been hacked for PC gaming and a few non-Microsoft-approved apps.

Microsoft said on its Kinect for Windows website that the new "SDK is designed for non-commercial purposes only," and that a commercial version is on the way.

At E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in Los Angeles last week, Microsoft pitched Kinect as a device useful to hard-core gamers. So far, the device has been used mostly for family-minded and group gaming.

Both efforts, with Kinect for Windows and core gamers, are attempts by Microsoft to broaden the appeal of the Kinect, and of hands-free motion control in its products.

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Photo: Attendees of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in Los Angeles play the video game Dance Central 2 for the Xbox 360 Kinect on June 7. Credit: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

AeroVironment inks deal with Hawaii to install charging stations for electric vehicles

Monrovia-based technology company AeroVironment Inc. announced a deal with Hawaii Thursday to install 320 electric charging docks throughout the state.

The $820,000 deal is the latest in a string of key contracts for the company, which comes as more electric vehicles arrive to the marketplace and more states move to build an infrastructure to support them.

"We’re deploying practical solutions for a game-changing electric transportation ecosystem that will dramatically alter the vehicle refueling paradigm for drivers in Hawaii, the United States and the world," Mike Bissonette, senior vice president of AeroVironment's Efficient Energy Systems, said in a statement.

AeroVironment, which also builds small hand-launched drones for the U.S. military, has now installed more than 1,000 of its electric stations in 18 states. The firm also recently began rolling out its home charging docks to accommodate Japanese carmaker Nissan and its all-electric Leaf passenger car.

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Kinect sells more than 10 million units, scores Guinness World Records nod

Microsoft has made it into the Guinness World Records with its Kinect for Xbox 360, officially the Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device.

The hands-free gaming device sold faster than the various iterations of the iPhone and iPad, as consumers snapped up an average of 133,333 units daily.

That’s a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days on sale, speedier than any competitor in the same period.

Kinect showed up on shelves on Nov. 4 and has since then blazed past 10 million sales worldwide. And that’s without any sex games.

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Photo: A man plays a Kinect for XBox 360 boxing game at the Microsoft booth during the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January. Credit: Steve Marcus / Reuters

Microsoft to open up motion-sensing Kinect to developers, academics via SDK release

Microsoft plans to open up its Kinect motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360 to a wide array of engineers with the release of a Software Development Kit planned for this spring.

The Kinect SDK will be made available to noncommercial users such as enthusiasts and academic researchers.

"Microsoft's investments in natural user interfaces are vital to our long-term vision of creating computers that are intuitive to use and able to do far more for us," said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, in a company blog post. "The fruits of these research investments are manifesting across many of our products, Kinect for Xbox 360 among them."

A commercial version of the Kinect SDK is planned for a later date, Microsoft said.

"The SDK will give users access to deep Kinect system information such as audio, system application-programming interfaces and direct control of the Kinect sensor," the company said.

The move to release a proper Kinect SDK makes sense for Microsoft.

Kinect had already caught the attention of hackers, academics and some unwanted developers, who've come up with imaginative ways to use the camera system without such a resource.

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Photo: Employee Sean Jones exercises to a Kinect game in a Microsoft Store in Bellevue, Wash., last month. Credit: Elaine Thompson / Associated Press

Consumer Electronics Show: Gesture recognition heats up

 
Numerous manufacturers at this week's Consumer Electronics Show have demonstrated new approaches to the remote control that break out of the the left-right-up-down straitjacket. The most radical are technologies that have no remote at all -- instead they respond to a user's movements in front of the screen.

Competing examples on display were from PrimeSense, the Israeli designers of the microchips that power Microsoft's popular controller-free Kinect gaming accessory, and Softkinetic, a Belgian rival that powered an interactive billboard in Hollywood last summer for "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." The former relies on an approach called structured light -- a projector fills the area in front of the display with beams of infrared light, then a sensor detects how the beams are distorted by moving objects. The latter takes the so-called time of flight approach, which detects motion by projecting light in front of a display and measuring how long it takes to bounce back.

PrimeSense has a considerable head start in the gesture recognition field thanks to the inclusion of its technology in Kinect -- Microsoft sold some 8 million units of the device in 60 days. But games are "just the tip of the iceberg," said Uzi Breier, executive vice president of PrimeSense. "We're in the middle of a revolution. We're changing the interface between man and machine."

PrimeSense is focused on living room devices, while SoftKinect is also active in display advertising and medical applications. Breier said other possible uses include automobile security and safety, robotics, home security and rehabilitation.

For video games, PrimeSense's technology allows players to inhabit the virtual bodies of characters on screen. The sensors don't track motion perfectly, but they do well enough to make for a fully immersive experience. For home entertainment generally, Breier said, the company is trying to help consumers make the transition from TV channel surfing -- an activity well served by the up/down buttons on a conventional remote -- to video on demand, sorting through collections of programs to find the ones they want to watch.

The user interfaces that PrimeSense and Softkinect developed for TV services work pretty much the same way. Users raise a hand to place a circular cursor on the screen, then hold it on a spot to select an item. They can pull down menus or scroll through items in a similar fashion. The systems don't seem as responsive as the buttons on a remote, but they provide a more versatile and attractive interface.

Hyunsuk Kim, a senior vice president on Samsung's visual display research and development team, agreed that the way consumers interact with TVs has to change, given the complexity of the sets and the amount of content. Samsung has touch-screen remotes and is exploring voice and motion detection. But he's not convinced that consumers lying on the couch are going to want to sit up and wave their hands in order to change the channel.

"That's for fun," Kim said of motion-based controls. "Watching TV is a totally different experience."

All the same, Breier said he expected his company's gesture-recognition technology to be built directly into displays. "It will go into the bezel of the TV or the all-in-one PC. Absolutely. There are people working on it as we speak," he said. The company's only formal product announcement at the show, though, was the integration into a media-center computer by PC maker Asus.

PrimeSense is counting on software developers to build on the capabilities of its chips. Softkinect, on the other hand, started out developing a software platform and applications that could work with any manufacturer's 3-D sensors, then they bought chip designer Optrima to develop its own time-of-flight processors.

The advantage to the time-of-flight approach, said Softkinetic chief strategy officer Eric Krzeslo, is that it can be accomplished with less powerful chips that are less expensive and consume less power. It's also capable of operating at a much higher frame rate -- up to 100 frames per second -- for more precise motion tracking.

Softkinetic expects games to be a driving force for gesture technology, but TV set-top box makers are interested too, said Virgile Delporte, vice president of sales and marketing. The company's next major deployment will be in Asia in the first quarter this year, followed by Europe and the U.S., he said.

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.