Kinect sees dead people!
By buft 38 Comments
So I picked up Kinect day one, my first impressions with it where fairly positive for the most part and for playing games it seems like it works pretty well. However there is one other potential use I have discovered for all those Kinect devices in peoples homes. Catching Ghosts!
The reason I’m writing this blog is that the freakiest thing happened to me while taking a break from the rigors of motion control gaming, having sat down just out of view of the sensor but in a position to still see the screen I started browsing the internet and eventually the Xbox went into the screensaver mode which reduces the screen brightness.
Every few minutes I noticed that the TV screen would light up and the Kinect sensor would try and adjust its angle before going back into standby mode, thinking nothing of it and continuing with my browsing I was content in presuming that this was something the Sensor did to calibrate for changes in the room.
Then the incident occurred, the camera started adjusting and out of curiosity I looked up and saw that on the dashboard IR input display the screen was lit up as if the camera had detected hands waving, a little freaked out I got up to check it out and then the straw that broke the camels back the screen flashed purple indicating that it had indeed found a person.
This happened just for a second and then it was gone but it freaked me out and I decided to check out information on how the IR sensor works and apparently the Kinect sensor incorporates two separate technologies that are typically used by ghost hunters.
The IR sensor for detecting possible anomalous movement and the multiple microphone setup with a system to reduce ambient background noise which creates the possibility of capturing disembodied voices.
As someone who is sceptical of ghosts and ghost hunting I honestly don’t believe what I saw was indeed a ghost, possibly it was a mote of dust or some sort of glitch in the system but I wanted to throw this out there and gauge peoples thoughts, especially the people who do believe in this stuff .
Who we gonna call? Microsoft Ghostbusters!