Kinect space saver on its way The problem with Xbox Kinect - aside from a decent range of top-drawer titles - is the inability to play without a large living room and yards of space. Gaming accessories manufacturer Nyko seeks to change all that, though, with this badboy accessory. The Nyko Zoom for Kinect reduces the space required to play Kinect by up to …
If such a simple mod like this actually works, it makes you wonder why this kind of functionality wasn't just built in. I know a few peeps whom have passed on getting Kinnected because of lounge real estate concerns. Seems M$ have been needlessly deterring customers with this kind of oversight. Hopefully any potential K2.0 will include it. :-)
Tie-ins for The Hobbit, Harry Potter: Below Stairs, Life's Too Short, Snow White, and We Get It Already, You Mean Dwarfs.
Maybe there's something in Teletubbies, they were full size adults in costume, you know. Which means the rabbits were enormous, and indeed they were.
It will reduce the /apparent/ size of what the kinect 'sees', which is what you want, because you are going to be standing closer, which makes your apparent size bigger again to compensate. Using it without moving closer to the device would, of course, do as you suggest, but that is not the point.
A better analogy than 'binoculars backwards' would be macro-mode on a digital camera - it still has the same k-pixels in the image, but the subject has to be a lot closer to the lense to fill the frame.
is that the Kinect's view would probably become a bit fish-eyed and software may be less resilient at identifyiny the body's placement in the scene with the distortion, particularly around the edges. Only real-world testing would show if it is enough of an effect to matter.
Undoubtedly the folks at MS thought about using a variable lens in the Kinect to accommodate a much greater range of playing distances. I'm sure it came down to the fixed lenses having a greater profit margin... err, I mean would be more affordable. With that in mind they simply picked what seemed to be a reasonable range and wrote it into the design spec. That said, dropping a set of specs over the top does seem an elegantly simple solution.
D'oh slap because I'm sure there are a lot of them being heard in Redmond about now.
.. is it essentially a fish eye lense for the Kinect? How does the Kinect then correct proportions?
Anyway, I'm not really bothered: the missus wanted something with a game to do some exercises, tried the Kinect at PC World, neither of us were impressed, so I bought a Wii + Wii Fit on eBay.
I'm not fully convinced the Wii Fit is great either (it doesn't work well for me either, it's designed for 5 feet tall people with size 6 shoes weighting no more than 9.5 stones, in other words it's designed for Japanese), but the wife is happy (she easily fits in these specs!), so that's sorted as far as I'm concerned.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
