a Kinect-ed Teleconference

, 10 April 2011
news

The wonders and versatility of the Kinect technology (well, home hacks) keep amazing us, this last one comes from that new fabric of interactive dreams called MIT Media Lab (remember their recompose project?), who, despite maybe not being way more innovative that other media labs around the world they certainly come up with great ideas (and market & communicate them much more efficiently).

Four key people behind the project: Lining Yao, Anthony DeVincenzi, Ramesh Raskar & Hiroshi Ishii; and what have they come up with? The future of Teleconferencing.

A good bunch of practical tweaks to the current & traditional system mixing several solutions (Kinect + Augmented reality…), that should make Cisco Systems or Polycom rethink their current offer.

What we can do if the screen in videoconference rooms can turn into an interactive display? With Kinect camera and sound calibration system, we can easily access the spatially calibrated depth and audio information. We introduced four features, which are “Talking to Focus”, “Freezing Former Frames”, “Privacy Zone” and “Spacial Augmenting Reality”.

"Talking to Focus"

Being a regular videoconference user I have to say that some (if not all) of the above presented services (add-ons?) are highly practical (especially between corporate with affiliate meetings or dealing with other countries) and we’re really really hoping they’ll come out to the market very soon (Microsoft plz?).

Much more info (and way better explanations) on their dedicated “Kinected conference” page.