The story of how Bill and Paul Allen honed their early programming skills on a PDP-10 mainframe at Computer Center Corporation (CCC) while in high school is well known. In an email exchange with Ed Lazowska, former chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Bill discussed the significant role that the UW’s computer systems also played in their early years.
Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates recently gave a talk at the University of Washington, where talked about “The Power of the Natural User Interface.”
In the post and in the talk (video embedded below), he talks about Kinect and the role it has in bringing NUI to more more and as we’ve been talking about recently with the Kinect Effect he talked about Kinect being much more than just a cool video game technology.
Gates talks about the profound implications of Kinect and the range of directions in which it’s being taken and in the talk he gives a live demo of Kinect Fusion.
Quote from Gates blog post:
Kinect is a remarkable technical achievement. The ability to take video cameras, multi-array microphones, and depth sensors and bring them all together in order to recognize people, understand and anticipate how they move, incorporate voice recognition, and insert them into games–all at 30 frames per second–is phenomenal. (It holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever, with 8 million units sold in the first 60 days it was on sale.)
it is the most advanced example of a wave of new advances that are enabling people to interact with technology in entirely new ways.