Kinnect

Holy Wow.. The Microsoft Kinnect is amazing! However, I don't say that because I like the game, I say it because the technology amazes me. In order to understand why the Kinnect is amazing, you must first understand its competition.

The Wii, uses several infrared diodes that are tracked by the controller. This means that it can track one joint of motion. Basically if you move your wrist it can see it. Initially this was revolutionary, allowing players to make movements and the games would interpret them.

Like the Wii, the PS3 also uses infrared.. actually the Play Station solution basically mirrors the Wii solution except it uses the orb on the end of the wand to optically track the one joint of motion. At best this is evolutionary, if not just a clone of the Wii functionality.

Now the big boy, the Kinnect. This thing can track up to 16 joints of motion in 2 players simultaneously. It does this by projecting thousands of tiny infrared dots all across the room and then watching for position changes in these dots by using the on-board infrared camera. So right there you have 32 times more accuracy with no controller. Definitely Revolutionary!

A few years back Microsoft was talking about touch tables. Essentially these were tables where the entire table would be a computer screen. With the recent coming of age of gestures and multi-touch in the i-products, and with this software to track gesticulations from Microsoft, it doesn't take much to imagine the next version of windows available as a table top or a wall version.