If you’ve got a crazy ingenious idea for Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral, but don’t have the means to make your dream a reality, the Kinect Accelerator just might be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Microsoft, having performed a complete 180-degree turnaround from their initial stance on Kinect hacking, is embracing developers more than ever with this new program. They are offering a $20,000 along with development space to ten startup companies, in hopes of turning out some incredible Kinect applications. At the end of the three month program, each group will have the opportunity to present their creations to a group of angel investors, which is a fantastic opportunity.

Obviously competition to gain entry into the program will be pretty fierce, but if you think you have what it takes, get your application in now. Judging by the Kinect Accelerator FAQ section, this looks to be something geared towards small tech startups rather than individuals, but it never hurts to give it a shot.

Yes, the Kinect is over one year old now, and after some initial unhappiness from [Microsoft], it’s become a hacker’s best friend. [Eric] decided to celebrate this with an Article all about how it works.  If you’re new to this piece of hardware and want to get into working with it, this should be a good hacking introduction.  If you’ve been reading [HAD] lately, you will have noticed this information being used to “build a Kinect bot for 500 bones.”

Some interesting facts in this article include that the Kinect measures 307200 distance point, known as a “point cloud” in the gaming area. From this, it’s able to construct a 3D image of the environment around it and allow interaction. Such interesting hardware didn’t take long to hack after Adafruit announced a $3000.00 bounty to open it up to the masses.  This only took four days to do, making one wonder why, with their incredible resources, [Microsoft] wouldn’t either more effectively lock it down or officially open it to be hacked and modified to begin with. Our vote would be to officially open it up, but no one consulted us on the decision.

Microsoft has thrown its hat into the open source hardware hobby market. Their offering is called the Gadgeteer. We’d love to tell you all about it, but the big M didn’t make it very easy to find out about the device and it’s addons. When we set out to find what processor is running on the board we were happy to see that they do call it an Open Source Hardware project, but no schematic is posted. When we did finally navigate to the hardware documentation it’s a file that must be downloaded and you’ve got to agree to their licensing before grabbing it. So that’s as far as we went, and now we’ll go back to using more open tools.

For those of you who aren’t scared off by the lack of openness, the first thing you’ll notice about this board is that it’s full of connector headers. Instead of the small rows that Arduino uses, the Gadgeteer is meant to use ribbon cables to connect to various breakout boards. You can program for the platform in C# using the .NET framework. This means using Microsoft Visual Studio for those that are already acquainted with the platform. But regular readers will note that we’re always looking for Linux support in our IDEs and you won’t find that here.

[Thanks Hrasdt (and several others) via Slashdot]

In 2009, while Microsoft was busy designing and marketing what would become the Kinect, [Carlos Anzola], an inventor, tinkerer, and self-ascribed geek from Bogotá, Colombia, had been working for years on a nearly identical gesture interface for the PC. His creation, the Human interface Electronic Device, or HiE-D – pronounced ‘Heidi’ - was capable of gesture recognition years before Microsoft would release the Kinect.

After developing his gesture recognition device in 2007, Microsoft showed interest in [Carlos]‘ device – going so far as to request a prototype. Microsoft suggested that he should apply for a patent on his technology. [Carlos] did just that, sending in patent applications to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization a mere two days before the announcement of Project Natal and a full seven months before Microsoft applied for their Kinect patent.

Since the release of the Kinect, [Carlos] has been showing the HiE-D around Bogotá and has put a few videos of his technology up on Youtube, one of which can be seen below. You can also check out his Youtube channel for some great demos.

With a reputation of experience in computer video, animation, and 3D processing, [Carlos] was approached by a technophobic American dentist who wanted a faster laser scanner for 3D modeling of his patient’s teeth. [Carlos] built an improved laser scanner and was featured on Caracol Noticias, a Columbian Newscast. [Carlos] had to deal with a bit of feature creep from the technophobe dentist, because he now wanted to manipulate the models of his patient’s mouths without using a mouse. [Carlos] was hugely influenced by the Minority Report computer interface, and decided the easiest way to interface with a computer would be a gesture interface.

[Carlos] set out to build a device that would allow a person to control a computer using only gestures. His HiE-D would be a surprisingly simple but devilishly clever device. The HiE-D projects a pattern of dots, or constellation, in infrared onto the user. Infrared is invisible to the human eye, but is easily picked up by a camera onboard the HiE-D. This is how the Microsoft Kinect works, and can be seen by a video camera in nightshot mode. When the camera detects a change in this constellation, the image is processed and can identify reference points in the user’s face, hands, or even their entire body.

After hearing of the HiE-D, Microsoft courted [Carlos] and requested a prototype. He gave Microsoft a prototype of the HiE-D, and according to [Carlos], it was taken to Redmond in February of 2007 – more than two years before the announcement of Project Natal. After meeting with Microsoft two more times that year, he was told by Microsoft that a patent on his invention wouldn’t be a bad idea.

While any action on Microsoft’s part would be speculation, we will say that the Kinect is remarkably similar to the HiE-D. Both use a ‘constellation’ of infrared dots projected on the user, and both can are able to detect the ‘skeleton’ of a user for motion control. The image below, from the HiE-D patent, shows how the movement of a face can be tracked.

Today, [Carlos] is in talks with a few interested companies that would like to produce the HiE-D. He says it would sell for only $50 USD, compared to $140 for a Microsoft Kinect. The HiE-D doesn’t have a camera to capture video of a user, so playing dress up with a HiE-D would be impossible. This wouldn’t be to much of a drawback, because some of the most impressive Kinect hacks we’ve seen wouldn’t change at all with the HiE-D.

[Carlos] says he’s been in contact with a few lawyers in Boston, who believes he has a case against Microsoft for patent infringement. He’s undecided about how to proceed at this point – Microsoft does have the war chest to go after Google for Android and defend itself over its use of 3D mapping. If we were [Carlos], we’d be pretty skeptical about our chances as well.

A flurry of interest from the hacker community surrounded the Kinect before its release date – there were bounties posted to develop an open-source driver so the Kinect would operate outside the closed Xbox ecosystem. The fact that a driver was released hours after the official launch of the Kinect is a testament to the interest in gesture recognition and the Minority Report interface. At Hack A Day, it’s not unusual to see tinkerers and geeks re-imagine existing products; there have been copies of the Microsoft Surface, and an attempt to reverse engineer the Playstation Move. Most of these are reimaginings of existing ideas or devices, which makes the uniqueness of [Carlos]‘s build all the more amazing.

We’re reminded of the abilities of the anonymous home tinkerer every day. To us, “hacker” is a label of creativity, investigation, and understanding. Like [Carlos], some of us eventually stumble upon a new idea that will change how humans interact with their environment. Although [Carlos] may not get the windfall he deserves, we’re still pretty jealous of his ability to build something, alone in a small workshop, that would change how people interact with computers.

Looks like someone figured out the algorithm that Microsoft uses to generate unique codes for their alternative currency: Microsoft Points. We were always a bit baffled by the need to do this sort of thing (Disney dollars, tokens at arcades, etc.) but figured it’s just a grift to get you to spend more dough. Looks like this time it may have come back to bite them in the ass with early loss projections somewhere in the $1-$1.2 million range.

But as most of you know, it’s not just an algorithm that can cause this kind of havoc. Whomever figured out how to crunch the numbers apparently packaged the method into a nice GUI and distributed it over the Internet. Check out the video after the break to see that not only will it give you a code, but you can verify that it works at the click of a button. Microsoft is taking steps to invalidate all of the ill-gotten redemption codes, but we wonder how effective they can be at it. Surely they already had contingency plans for this and we wonder if the company didn’t also carry insurance against this kind of loss.

Try as we might, we couldn’t turn up a press release on the subject. If you know of any, please be kind and leave a link in the comments.

[Reddit via Geek]

The picture below is Intel’s iteration of System on a Chip.

These next three photos are from Snapdragon, Texas Instruments OMAP and Nvidia’s Tegra Platform all using an ARM processor:

What is interesting is how Adafruit has chosen to close this contest. Not only are they giving [Hector] his prize money, they are also donating an additional $2,000 to the EFF who fight for our right to legally hack and reverse engineer our own equipment.

[Hector] is being generous as well, using his prize money to help pay for gadgets to hack with some teams he is involved with, mainly the iPhone Dev Team and the Wii hacker team “Twiizers”

[thanks Rapps]

[Nathan Long] sent in two fairly simple mods he’s been working on. The first is the control of Woot-off Lights via LPT port. A computer checks Woot for the Woot-off logo, and if the logo is spotted, on go the lights. It’s really just a twist on the LED/Arduino email message system, but the creativity is nice.

His other modification is the stuffing of a Microsoft Intellimouse inside of a Logitech Wingman. With the goal of giving the old PS/2 mouse USB capabilities and removing the terrible ball. For those that are asking themselves “why bother? Terrible ergonomics, no scroll wheel, etc.” [Nathan] claims it’s for Quake 2 nostalgia, to each their own we suppose.

We often hear people touting the evilness of DRM, but usually they are talking about the idea of ownership. In this case, DRM is actually causing harm. It turns out that Microsoft’s msnetobj.dll, which is supposed to enforce DRM on your computer, stopping you from doing certain things like saving files you don’t “own” is open to 3 attacks.  Vulnerable to buffer overflow, integer overflow, and denial of service, this sucker is riddled with issues.

The vulnerabilities in this file aren’t groundbreaking. Buffer overflow is a common method to get to many systems. The problem here, according to some commenters at BoingBoing, is the fact that this DLL is called every time you open a media file.

[via BoingBoing]

Looks like Microsoft has come up with a pretty slick little keyboard. It’s very much like the Optimus, which has an OLED screen in every key, except that it doesn’t have a screen in every key. Instead there’s just one screen on the whole unit and they keys have been overlayed on top while allowing the image to show through. Brilliant really, since this should drastically reduce the $2400 price tag of the original. That is, if you could buy the device. Microsoft’s not selling this hardware (yet anyway), but offering it up as test hardware for the UIST Innovation Contest. It will be interesting to see what the students come up with. This keyboard should be easier to program for since it involves manipulating just one screen. There is also extra space at the top that is touch-sensitive. See for yourself after the break.

[Thanks FaSMaN via Gizmodo]

There has been another development in the never-ending battle that is Microsoft trying to keep its gaming system closed to unauthorized use. Xbox-scene reports that a new hack called freeBOOT v0.01 allows the Xbox 360 to upgrade to the newer kernels, but allows the option of rebooting to an older kernel in order use the JTAG exploit and gain access to the hardware.

In case you missed it, the JTAG hack is a way to run homebrew code on an Xbox 360. Exploiting this hack makes it possible to boot a Linux kernel in about five seconds. We’ve long been fans of the homebrew work done with XBMC on the original Xbox and hope that advances like this will lead to that end. We want this because the older hardware cannot handle high definition content at full resolution but the Xbox 360 certainly can.

This exploit is still far from perfect. It currently requires that the Cygnos360 mod chip be installed on the system. A resistor also needs to be removed from the board to prevent accidental kernel updating. That being said, this is still progress. If you’re interested in step-by-step details, take a look at the text file instructions provided.

[Thanks wdfowty]

Microsoft is showing off five concepts for added mouse functionality. All of them seek to replace traditional move-and-click with touch sensitivity through either capacitive sensing, video recognition, sensor articulation, or laser scanning. We’re excited about the prospects of some of these features but at the same time wonder what this does to the price of this much-abused peripheral. After the break we’ll touch on each of the devices, along with time references for the video embedded above.

Capacitive Mouse (0:00)

The first offering is the closest to what we have now. It is a standard mouse that has a capacitive pad covering the body. This pad detects and reports any touches, demonstrated by on-screen blotches where the hand makes contact. We see this as a laptop touch-pad wrapped around a desktop mouse. Wrap it up and ship it out, we want one!

Video Multi-touch Mouse (1:52)

The next concept uses a curved piece of acrylic as the part of the body where you’d usually find the buttons. The secret to the sensing is a built in camera that passes image data to the computer. The touch sensitivity is provided by analyzing the image data. We’re a bit skeptical that this processing can be done inside of the mouse but we guess that’s for the R&D guys to work out. Also, how clean does the acrylic need to be to get a good image for processing?

Articulated Mouse (3:28)

Definitely the weirdest of the bunch. This is three mice in one, with a traditional mouse senor under an articulated pad for your thumb, and another for your pointer finger. The third sensor is in the mouse body itself where the palm of your hand rests. Tactile buttons can be added to the two satellite pads. We’re sure someone has a great use for this, but it would probably be no more popular than trackballs were.

Orb Mouse (4:56)

The orb is another camera-based design. Instead of a curved sheet of acrylic it utilizes a dome-shaped piece. The same concerns about video analysis exist but make sure you watch the demonstration of this used as a one-handed FPS controller.

Side Mouse (6:34)

This mouse makes your desk into the multi-touch area. It uses infrared laser scanning to pick up finger presses and motions in the general area around the mouse body. This reminds us of the laser qwerty keyboard and may be just as cool, who knows? We would anticipate some degree of a learning curve in using this device.

Conclusion

We’d love to see new and improved input devices readily available at a bargain price. Are those goals attainable? This really is inventing a better mouse(trap).

[via Mashable]

[Thanks Alex]

A new operating system, code named Barrelfish is being developed by Microsoft research labs and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. This operating system is being built with multi core operations foremost in priority. It is supposed to be extremely scalable and able to function on a very wide range of hardware. You can download the current snapshot of it on their site and dig into the source code, released under a 3-clause BSD style license. If you would like to learn the primary differences between this OS and Windows or Linux, you can read this PDF.

[via Engadget]

Our friends over at ifixit are at it again, how they get these devices so early before release and make a complete teardown in time still amazes us. Today they bring us the latest Microsoft media device, the Zune HD. Some features worth mentioning: The astoundingly thin, 1mm we’re talking, OLED screen. The Nvidia Tegra 2600 processor, hinting at 3D game capability. And finally who could forget the 660 mAh battery. But isn’t that 129 mAh less than the iPod touch? Microsoft’s reply, supposedly the Zune HD is using many more low power hardware solutions in this device. Either way, the competition is on, who will be the victor?