This year, I bought Microsoft Kinect cameras for the nephews and niece. At first they will mostly play energetic X-box games with them but my hope is they will start to play with the things coming from the Kinect hacking community -- the videos of the top hacks are quite interesting. At first, MS wanted to lock down the Kinect and threaten the open source developers who reverse engineered the protocol and released drivers. Now Microsoft has official open drivers.

This camera produced a VGA colour video image combined with a Z (depth) value for each pixel. This makes it trivial to isolate objects in the view (like people and their hands and faces) and splitting foreground from background is easy. The camera is $150 today (when even a simple one line LIDAR cost a fortune not long ago) and no doubt cameras like it will be cheap $30 consumer items in a few years time. As I understand it, the Kinect works using a mixture of triangulation -- the sensor being in a different place from the emitter -- combined with structured light (sending out arrays of dots and seeing how they are bent by the objects they hit.) An earlier report that it used time-of-flight is disputed, and implies it will get cheaper fast. Right now it doesn't do close up or very distant, however. While projection takes power, meaning it won't be available full time in mobile devices, it could still show up eventually in phones for short duration 3-D measurement.

I agree with those that think that something big is coming from this. Obviously in games, but also perhaps in these other areas.

Gestural interfaces and the car

While people have already made "Minority Report" interfaces with the Kinect, studies show these are not very good for desktop computer use -- your arms get tired and are not super accurate. They are good for places where your interaction with the computer will be short, or where using a keyboard is not practical.

One place that might make sense is in the car, at least before the robocar. Fiddling with the secondary controls in a car (such as the radio, phone, climate system or navigation) is always a pain and you're really not supposed to look at your hands as you hunt for the buttons. But taking one hand off the wheel is OK. This can work as long as you don't have to look at a screen for visual feedback, which is often the case with navigation systems. Feedback could come by audio or a heads up display. Speech is also popular here but it could be combined with gestures.

A Gestural interface for the TV could also be nice -- a remote control you can't ever misplace. It would be easy to remember gestures for basic functions like volume and channel change and arrow keys (or mouse) in menus. More complex functions (like naming shows etc.) are best left to speech. Again speech and gestures should be combined in many cases, particularly when you have a risk that an accidental gesture or sound could issue a command you don't like.

I also expect gestures to possibly control what I am calling the "4th screen" -- namely an always-on wall display computer. (The first 3 screens are Computer, TV and mobile.) I expect most homes to eventually have a display that constantly shows useful information (as well as digital photos and TV) and you need a quick and unambiguous way to control it. Swiping is easy with gesture control so being able to just swipe between various screens (Time/weather, transit arrivals, traffic, pending emails, headlines) might be nice. Again in all cases the trick is not being fooled by accidental gestures while still making the gestures simple and easy.

In other areas of the car, things like assisted or automated parking, though not that hard to do today, become easier and cheaper.

Small scale robotics

I expect an explosion in hobby and home robotics based on these cameras. Forget about Roombas that bump into walls, finally cheap robots will be able to see. They may not identify what they see precisely, though the 3D will help, but they won't miss objects and will have a much easier time doing things like picking them up or avoiding them. LIDARs have been common in expensive robots for some time, but having it cheap will generate new consumer applications.

Mobile

There will be some gestural controls for phones, particularly when they are used in cars. I expect things to be more limited here, with big apps to come in games. However, history shows that most of the new sensors added to mobile devices cause an explosion of innovation so there will be plenty not yet thought of. 3-D maps of areas (particularly when range is longer which requires power) can also be used as a means of very accurate position detection. The static objects of a space are often unique and let you figure out where you are to high precision -- this is how the Google robocars drive.

Security & facial recognition

3-D will probably become the norm in the security camera business. It also helps with facial recognition in many ways (both by isolating the face and allowing its shape to play a role) and recognition of other things like gait, body shape and animals. Face recognition might become common at ATMs or security doors, and be used when logging onto a computer. It also makes "presence" detection reliable, allowing computers to see how and where people are in a room and even a bit of what they are doing, without having to object recognition. (Though as the kinect hacks demonstrate, they help object recognition as well.)

Face recognition is still error-prone of course so its security uses will be initially limited, but it will get better at telling among people.

Virtual worlds & video calls

While some might view this as gaming, we should also see these cameras heavily used in augmented reality and virtual world applications. It makes it easy to insert virtual objects into a view of the physical world and have a good sense of what's in front and what's behind. In video calling, the ability to tell the person from the background allows better compression, as well as blanking of the background for privacy. Effectively you get a "green screen" without the need for a green screen.

You can also do cool 3-D effects by getting an easy and cheap measurement of where the viewer's head is. Moving a 3-D viewpoint in a generated or semi-generated world as the viewer moves her head creates a fun 3-D effect without glasses and now it will be cheap. (It only works for one viewer, though.) Likewise in video calls you can drop the other party into a different background and have them move within it in 3-D.

With multiple cameras it is also possible to build a more complete 3-D model of an entire scene, with textures to paint on it. Any natural scene can suddenly become something you can fly around.

Amateur video production

Some of the above effects are already showing up on YouTube. Soon everybody will be able to do it. The Kinect's firmware already does "skeleton" detection, to map out the position of the limbs of a person in the view of the camera. That's good for games but also allows motion capture for animation on the cheap. It also allows interesting live effects distorting the body or making light sabres glow. Expect people in their own homes to be making their own Avatar like movies, at least on a smaller scale.

These cameras will become so popular we may need to start worrying about interference by their structured light. These are apps I thought of in just a few minutes. I am sure there will be tons more. If you have something cool to imagine, put it in the comments.

Happy Seasons to all! and a Merry New Year.