Microsoft‘s Kinect peripheral for Xbox 360 will soon be getting PC driver support, but it seems that the company has, or at one point had, more in mind for the body motion-sensing device. A newly published patent application at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (via Being Manan) shows that the company has put some effort into developing support for personalized gestures that can be stored in networked individual user profiles.
As the application reads, a “gesture-based system” for which “no controllers or devices are necessary” can be trained to recognize and store user-specific movements to a profile. That profile information, which “can be further updated with the latest data,” can be used for “gesture recognition techniques.” The patent application abstract also makes mentions of “roaming” gesture profiles which “is available in a second location without requiring the system to relearn gestures that have already been personalized on behalf of the user.”
Or, in layman’s terms: the motion detection hardware — let’s just assume it’s the Kinect for the sake of argument — can “learn” the the moves you make and store them to a profile, allowing it to more accurately respond to your specific interactions with it. That profile is then saved in a network and can be accessed from other devices.
This is less about in-game interactions and more about improving the quality of Kinect reading and responding to user inputs. The patent application is dated October 2009, so it’s not a brand new concept that the Redmond-based company is exploring here. Presumably, we could see support for this or something like it in a software update down the road.
