"Gestris" - Gaming with Gestures

Intel’s Pittsburgh Research Lab opened its doors this week for a tour of the fascinating exploratory research they’re doing on future technologies including a natural gesture interface for games built as a novel application of SLIPstream parallelization techniques.

The Pittsburgh lab demonstrated this interface with a head-to-head Tetris-style game, where the players use whole body gestures to control the motion of their pieces.

Unlike typical approaches to gesture detection that employ props, special clothing/markers (motion capture systems) or a controlled environment such as a blue screen), the Intel approach is designed to work in everyday environments and does not require users to be segmented from the background. Although the technique is computationally expensive, the researchers have achieved interactive speeds by parallelizing the vision algorithm across a cluster of machines in a manner that minimizes latency.

NEHALEM - Intel's Next Generation Processor

Nehalem is the codename for an Intel processor microarchitecture, successor to the Core microarchitecture. The first processor released with the Nehalem architecture is the desktop Core i7, to be released in Q4 2008. Server and mobile Nehalem-based processors will follow in 2009 and 2010.

Initial Nehalem processors use the same 45 nm manufacturing methods as Penryn. A working system with two Nehalem processors was shown at Intel Developer Forum Fall 2007, and a large number of Nehalem systems were shown at Computex in June 2008.

The architecture is named after the Nehalem River in Northwest Oregon, which is in turn named after the Nehalem Native American tribe in Oregon.

A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution

In an e-mail to customers, Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, shares information about new technologies from Microsoft that will open the door to a new generation of solutions that extend from the desktop to the mobile phone, the mobile media player, the car, the TV, and beyond.

During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It’s a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It’s a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It’s a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment.

Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. “Cloud computing” that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive datacenters is one example. Social networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another.

Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HD TV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few.

What’s missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn’t bounded by device or location.

Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible.

Why can’t we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs?

Why isn’t all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application?

Why can’t we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?

Pl. visit http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2008/10-28nexttechrevolution.mspx to read the full text of the interview.