{"id":287486,"date":"2013-10-02T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2013-10-02T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=287486"},"modified":"2016-09-12T09:41:16","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T16:41:16","slug":"collaboration-expertise-produce-enhanced-sensing-xbox-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/collaboration-expertise-produce-enhanced-sensing-xbox-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Collaboration, Expertise Produce Enhanced Sensing in Xbox One"},"content":{"rendered":"
Cyrus Bamji had encountered a challenge. Luckily for him, Microsoft Research had just the solution.<\/p>\n
Bamji, Microsoft partner hardware architect for Microsoft\u2019s Silicon Valley-based Architecture and Silicon Management group, and members of his team were trying to incorporate a time-of-flight camera into Xbox One<\/a>, the successor to the wildly popular Xbox 360<\/a>.<\/p>\n A time-of-flight camera emits light signals and then measures how long it takes them to return. That needs to be accurate to 1\/10,000,000,000 of a second\u2014remember, we\u2019re talking the speed of light here. With such measurements, the camera is able to differentiate light reflecting from objects in a room and the surrounding environment. That provides an accurate depth estimation that enables the shape of those objects to be computed.<\/p>\n That speed-of-light capability would be a major advancement for the Kinect sensor portion of Xbox One, being released to 13 launch markets next month. The new Kinect, a key differentiator for Xbox One against its competition, needed to capture a larger field of view with greater accuracy and higher resolution. An infrared sensor will enable object identification requiring little to no light, and improved hand-pose recognition, giving gamers and more casual users the ability to control the console with their hands.<\/p>\n But Cyrus Bamji had a challenge. The sensor was great, but it also left those working on it eager to do even more with it.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we take a relatively new technology, such as time-of-flight, and put it into a commercial product, there are a whole bunch of things that happen,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are things that we didn\u2019t know how important they were until the product was made. For example, we know theoretically that motion blur in time of flight is a big problem, but just how important is only discoverable when you\u2019re building a product with it and that product needs to deliver an excellent experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Accurate depth measurement in diverse scenes with the new camera\u2019s high resolution and a wider field of view also pose user-experience issues, making it difficult to keep small objects, such as a finger, from fading into the background, for instance. While those features delivered more versatile device performance, they also created issues of their own in real-life scenarios, such as the need for accurate depth measurement in diverse, high-resolution scenes. That, as well as improving the wider field of view and the motion blur, required clean data\u2014quickly. Xbox One had to be ready for the 2013 holiday season.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew our time was limited,\u201d Bamji recalls. \u201cBut we also had the advantage of being able to tap into Microsoft Research\u2019s deep reservoir of technical expertise to get expert advice and help solve the various problems we encountered with new, cutting-edge solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n