Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Eedoo to Compete with Xbox on Gesture Recognition

Reuters: I missed this news from about half a year ago that China-based company Eedoo plans to release its own eBox equipped with camera with gesture recognition. The company has been spun-off from Lenovo. eBox is to be sold in China only.

Eedoo claims to be the No. one in China and No. two in the world with full body gesture recognition in game console. Talking about the gesture-recognition camera portion, China Daily newspaper published a figure on how it works:



The published console images from Kotaku site show a camera on top of TV that looks very similar to many other 3D depth-sensing ones:

12 comments:

  1. does anyone know whose 3D camera they use?

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  2. It could be PMD ...

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  3. from galaxiecore???

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  4. @ "It could be PMD ..."

    This is what I've heard too. I'm not sure how credible are these rumors.

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  5. I saw PMD CEO at the booth of Wistron...

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  6. Not surprising: Winstron is PMD's officially announced partner.

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  7. Here are a few additional paragraphs from the article at the China Daily newspaper hyperlink:

    In China, the total market volume is unknown, because the Chinese government has banned importing game consoles since 2000 and gray market transactions are illegal.

    The reason for the restrictions is because the government considers game consoles a potential danger to the physical and mental development of youth.

    Zhang Yaqin, Microsoft's corporate vice-president who leads research work in China, said in July that Microsoft hopes to get approval from Chinese regulators to begin selling the Xbox in China.

    "We hope to launch the Xbox as soon as possible, but it all depends on the government," Zhang said at the 2010 China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference (Chinajoy), an online gaming fair in Shanghai.

    The Xbox is manufactured in China and more than 40 million Xbox units have been sold overseas, according to Zhang. However, domestically, Xbox suffers from both market inaccessibility and piracy problems.


    To me it doesn't seem like much of an achievement to be "the No. one in China and No. two in the world with full body gesture recognition with game console" when the other company with a product to offer is not allowed to sell in the Chinese market.

    There is also something that I feel is dishonest in banning imports of game consoles as "a potential danger to the physical and mental development of youth" on the one hand, and on the other hand legally manufacturing 40 million such devices for export and fostering domestic development of a non-imported alternative.

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  8. China will develop all her own products, services ...
    Google <=> Baidu
    Wikipeda <=> BaiduPedia
    eBay <=> Taobao
    ...
    Xbox <=> EBox

    haha ..... why this ?

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  9. I think that this device is based on laser trangulation like Kinect. Using structured light for 3D is not new and you can find a lot of methods in the public domain. Image processing is classic, there is no difficulty for chinese developers.

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  10. CDM/ Anonymous, I have the same frustration sometime with the Chinese authorities and their rules. Don't worry though, they are digging their own grave ... it is just a matter of time until the population revolt.

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  11. I think the camera they use is a DepthSense camera from Softkinetic. If I'm right, it's a TOF camera.

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  12. Depthsense didn't work well, so they startet with structured Light. To my mind, Softkinetic seems to be unable to launch some first chip products. Maybe PMD woulh habe been the better choice, as they are already in the market since 2005 and habe design wins, a.g. in the automotive!

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