google's april fool's day prank becomes reality

[deadrats]

One of Google's 2011 April Fools' Day pranks was the so-called Gmail Motion feature, whereby you could control Gmail using full-body gestures. Many noted at the time that this could probably be done using Kinect, and viola: it's done.

http://hothardware.com/News/Gmail-Motion-April-Fools-Day-Joke-Realized-with-Kinect/

microsoft seems to have one hell of a tech winner on it's hands with that kinect.

[jagabo]

I didn't see him "type" a message... Motion control is completely unintuitive, limited, and imprecise. It will never have more than a few applications.

[edDV]

One of Google's 2011 April Fools' Day pranks was the so-called Gmail Motion feature, whereby you could control Gmail using full-body gestures. Many noted at the time that this could probably be done using Kinect, and viola: it's done.

http://hothardware.com/News/Gmail-Motion-April-Fools-Day-Joke-Realized-with-Kinect/

microsoft seems to have one hell of a tech winner on it's hands with that kinect.

Too bad Microsoft had to acquire (buy) Kinect. They have so many $billions in savings, top university grads and no ideas. Could this maybe be a management problem?

[jagabo]

Microsoft has never had any ideas. They've always (even when they bought QDOS to make DOS for IBM) bought or taken ideas from everyone else. They just do it really well!

[El Heggunte]

Is Kinect going to make Gmail faster (no crippled-functionality-without-Javascript) and transform Chrome into a semi-decent browser ?

Just asking.

[sum_guy]

IMHO motion control and tracking has many useful applications, some of the best work I've seen is by a Dutch Ph.d studen Joeren Hol, some of his work is found at XSens.

http://www.xsens.com/en/general/motiongrid

[ranchhand]

Microsoft has never had any ideas. They've always (even when they bought QDOS to make DOS for IBM) bought or taken ideas from everyone else

Absolutely correct. Remember when M/Soft "innovated" with the mouse back in the day? Remember it had two buttons and only one worked? That was so they wouldn't get sued by Apple who had the mouse first. Remember the Lotus 123 spreadsheet? Excel was just a copy of that. Remember a word processor called Wordstar, and later Word Perfect? Word is just a glorified version of those. And i could go on. Apple had the GUI interface long before Bill Gates got off his duff and decided to call his "Windows".

[TreeTops]

And Xerox had it before Apple.

[Cornucopia]

Microsoft has never had any ideas. They've always (even when they bought QDOS to make DOS for IBM) bought or taken ideas from everyone else

Absolutely correct. Remember when M/Soft "innovated" with the mouse back in the day? Remember it had two buttons and only one worked? That was so they wouldn't get sued by Apple who had the mouse first. Remember the Lotus 123 spreadsheet? Excel was just a copy of that. Remember a word processor called Wordstar, and later Word Perfect? Word is just a glorified version of those. And i could go on. Apple had the GUI interface long before Bill Gates got off his duff and decided to call his "Windows".

I'll give you the mouse, Excel, and many others, but the DOS they bought was 4bit and they actually had to recode it to support 8bit. ANd even more, MS Word may have been a latecomer, but I ALWAYS thought it worked better (and that was even before it became WYSIWYG - no contest after that!) and I used ALL of them at that time.
My impression of MS's abilities lies not whether they bought out somebody, but whether, after buying it, it stayed the same, got better, got worse or died.

Scott

[greymalkin]

And Xerox had it before Apple.

And everyone got schooled by Douglas Englebart. Take a look at this 1968 demo he gave where he showed his invention, the mouse, as well as word processing, hyperlinking, etc.

The guy was so far ahead of his time. In 1968 using a computer for personal reasons hadn't even entered into the mind of most people. Yet here this guy was showing how it would be done. Many people thought it was a hoax, others thought he was crazy to suggest the notion of a "personal computer".

It's a long demonstration but keeping the time period in mind it's absolutely fascinating to watch!

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

[Cornucopia]

Thanks, graymalkin. That was fun to watch. Spooky how many things he got right.

Scott