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Apple Confirms Acquisition of 3D Body Sensing Firm PrimeSense

Heh.

Modern technology has nothing on how powerful gesture and voice based remote controls were back in the 1950s and 1960s.

That's because back then, the kids in the living room WERE the remote control :)

The Father would either snap his fingers or command, "Change to the other channel" (this made sense as there were usually only two or three channels available over the air)... and the nearest kid would get off the floor and turn the channel knob on the TV set.

This would also often entail manipulating the rabbit ear antenna on top of the set, along with zero-ing in the channel with the fine-tune dial, and of course the horizontal and vertical sync controls.

Heck, sometimes the Father or Mother would simply say, "Now let's watch Bonanza!" and the "floor remote" would know which channel to go to.

All with one voice command or gesture. Amazing!!

1960s_TV.png
 
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Liquorpuki said:
Shouting at the box is quicker. I can say Xbox On and my TV and Remote turn on. I can say Xbox watch *name of channel* and it goes there.

It's like using a Moto X - it's easier to say OK Google Now, Navigate to *restaurant*. As opposed to hitting buttons and typing in addresses.

And the tech isn't mutually exclusive with using a remote either.
Click to expand...


And I'm still saying its half-baked. Unless it is flawless, it isn't quicker. It needs to be perfect, first time, every time. It's why the fingerprint scanner (at least for me) in the 5S isn't that useful either. Sometimes it hits first time, and other times I have to type in the passcode. I'd say the overall net time gain/loss is a wash. I'd imagine its the same with the Xbox One (based on reviews and friends that have it.)

Its cool, for sure. I just don't think the implementation is fully there yet. I hope to see it continuing to get better.
 
chrisbru said:
And I'm still saying its half-baked. Unless it is flawless, it isn't quicker. It needs to be perfect, first time, every time. It's why the fingerprint scanner (at least for me) in the 5S isn't that useful either. Sometimes it hits first time, and other times I have to type in the passcode. I'd say the overall net time gain/loss is a wash. I'd imagine its the same with the Xbox One (based on reviews and friends that have it.)

Its cool, for sure. I just don't think the implementation is fully there yet. I hope to see it continuing to get better.
Click to expand...

Well speech recognition is AI, which is based on probability, so it's never gonna be flawless but I think we'll get at a point where it's proven more convenient than pushing buttons.

To me that's already the case for a lot of things. I roll out of bed, saying "Xbox On" is easier than hunting for the remote. I got my hands busy (IE in the kitchen cooking something), I can just say Xbox Go to ESPN or something like that. Same with my Moto X - I don't know where my phone is, I can just yell OK Google Now Find My Phone and the sucker starts beeping.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on with always on speech coprocessors, I really wonder why Apple stuck a motion coprocessor on their latest hw instead of a speech one.
 
smoledman said:
This is a rare case of Apple getting MS's sloppy seconds. Microsoft doesn't even use PrimeSense tech anymore in Kinect v2. They have some in-house "time of flight" technology that transcends what PrimeSense has done. We'll see if this is valuable at all to Apple.
Click to expand...

English not being my native tongue, certain idiomatic constructs just escape my grasp. In this case I had it lost at "sloppy seconds", so I decided to trust google with this search for wisdom.

Now I can say that MacRumors forums are, indeed, an educational source.


Yours truly,
Samuel
 
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