Kinect not protected by design; Microsoft excited by us!
Joshua Blake
Mr. KIPMAN: What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor. The sensor again, as I talked earlier, has eyes and ears and that's a whole bunch of, you know, noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal. People...
FLATOW: So you left it open by design then? So you knew people could get into it.
Mr. KIPMAN: Yeah. Correct.
[...]
FLATOW: So you have no problem...
Prof. ISBISTER: As an...
FLATOW: ...with Microsoft, with the people using the open-source drivers then?
Ms. LOFTIS: As an experienced creator, I'm very excited to see that people are so inspired that it was less than a week after the Kinect came out before they had started creating and thinking about what they could do.
FLATOW: So no one is going to get in trouble?
Mr. KIPMAN: Nope. Absolutely not.
Ms. LOFTIS: No.
FLATOW: You heard it right from the mouth of Microsoft.
[...]
FLATOW: Are you going to encourage open source games to be made or other utilities to go with it?
Mr. KIPMAN: I would say the console market is a closed ecosystem.
FLATOW: Right.
Mr. KIPMAN: It's a closed ecosystem by design because we do need to control the experience. There's no installs. There's nothing ever that goes wrong. So it is a managed ecosystem. So on the console, that will remain this way. Although we do have, have had and will continue to have free tools that people can download - it's called XNA Studio - which allows you to create applications that you can deploy to the Xbox 360 that you can actually do. There's no Kinect support through XNA today, but that's something that we will support in the future.
FLATOW: Or now that the USB port is open in your PC to create open source games or tools that you can use.
Mr. KIPMAN: Yes, on...
FLATOW: Yeah.
Mr. KIPMAN: I would say on PC. People are already doing it today. I get YouTube videos on an hourly basis of people doing cool, neat, creative experiences based on using Kinect on PC.
---
Joshua Blake
Blog: http://nui.joshland.org
Multitouch on Windows book: http://manning.com/blake
Gil
Would that mean they're also going to give us a closed library of that
amazing skeletal tracking system they have?
Rohan Anil
^^ That would be awesome :D
--
Rohan Anil
Graduate Student
University of California, San Diego
baby-rabbit
day... but I think we should just be grateful that MS are being nice
and letting us do with it as we wish.
On Nov 20, 11:17 pm, Rohan Anil <rohan.a...@gmail.com> wrote:
Milan Kovac
would be legal thou.
Milan
On 20 nov, 04:14, Joshua Blake <joshbl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> These quotes from the Xbox Director of Incubation and Studio Manager of
> Microsoft Game Studios are about as explicit as we can get as permission to
> do what we're doing.
>
> Search for "hack" and start there. Money quotes below (emphasis mine):
>
> IRA FLATOW, host
> Ms. SHANNON LOFTIS (Studio Manager at Microsoft Game Studios)
> Mr. ALEX KIPMAN (Director of Incubation for Xbox at Microsoft)
>
> Mr. KIPMAN: What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs
> that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect by
> design, and reads the inputs from the sensor. The sensor again, as I talked
> earlier, has eyes and ears and that's a whole bunch of, you know, noise that
> someone needs to take and turn into signal. People...
>
> into it. *
>
> Mr. KIPMAN: *Yeah. Correct. *
> [...]
>
> FLATOW: So you have no problem...
>
> Prof. ISBISTER: As an...
>
> FLATOW: ...with Microsoft, with the people using the open-source drivers
> then?
>
> are so inspired* that it was less than a week after the Kinect came out
>
>
> Mr. KIPMAN: *Nope. Absolutely not. *
>
> Ms. LOFTIS: *No. *
> FLATOW: You heard it right from the mouth of Microsoft.
>
> [...]
>
> FLATOW: Are you going to encourage open source games to be made or other
> utilities to go with it?
>
> Mr. KIPMAN: I would say the console market is a closed ecosystem.
>
> FLATOW: Right.
>
> Mr. KIPMAN: It's a closed ecosystem by design because we do need to control
> the experience. There's no installs. There's nothing ever that goes wrong.
> So it is a managed ecosystem. So on the console, that will remain this way.
> Although we do have, have had and will continue to have free tools that
> people can download - it's called XNA Studio - which allows you to create
> applications that you can deploy to the Xbox 360 that you can actually do.
> There's no Kinect support through XNA today, but that's something that we
> will support in the future.
>
> FLATOW: Or now that the USB port is open in your PC to create open source
> games or tools that you can use.
>
>
> FLATOW: Yeah.
>
> Mr. KIPMAN: *I would say on PC.* People are already doing it today. I get
> experiences based on using Kinect on PC.
>
> ---
> Joshua Blake
> Microsoft Surface MVP
>
> (cell) 703-946-7176
Mike Harrison
>Hah, that's great. I'm still wondering if commercial applications
>would be legal thou.
Of course they would. You have bought hardware, you own it.
You didn't sign any license agreement when you bought it, so you can do whatever you like with it.
Even if the XBOX license forbids reverse-engineering the protocol, that only covers the person who
reverse-engineers it. Once the info is out there, there's nothing tehy can do to stop people using
it..
The only thing MS could do would be to obfuscate the interface, or if they really wanted to stop
people using it, have a secure challenge-response authentication scheme to activate it.
Nink
What would MS do ??
Sent from my BlackBerry