As reported yesterday at Reuters, Microsoft announced that it has sold more than 1 million of its new hands-free Kinect gaming systems in the first 10 days since launch, putting it on track to beat its target of 5 million sales by the end of the year.
The Kinect is a sensing device that plugs into the Xbox gaming console which allows the player to play games just by moving his or her body and speaking commands. The device is available as a standalone unit or bundled with a 4 gigabyte Xbox console.
Microsoft is hoping the new technology will help extend the role of its Xbox 360, which has sold 45 million units, and introduce a concept that is expected to feature in forms of electronics and computers in the next few years, while countering competing motion-based gaming systems from Nintendo Co, which makes the Wii, and Sony Corp, which introduced its Move product two months ago.
I said to myself, there has to be more to this story than the gaming system companies' rush up to Black Friday...there has to be a tech teardown of this master gadget's hardware and technology out there on the Web. And so there is.
As briefly summarized at ubergizmo, the device incorporates a strong albeit small fan amongst a plethora of sensors, a quartet of microphones, a couple of autofocus cameras that have been specially optimized for depth detection, an IR transmitting diode, 64 MB of Hynix DDR2 SDRAM, a motor and a three-axis accelerometer. The device is essentially a sophisticated sensor suite that detects a body's position and movements in 3D space.
The teardown motherlode for this thing, however, is to be found at ifixit.com ("the free repair manual anyone can edit"): Microsoft Kinect Teardown (ifixit.com).
As meticulously detailed in the teardown, most of the Xbox's processing power is dedicated to gaming, so Kinect preprocesses the image prior to sending it on to the Xbox. Two CMOS cameras and an IR projector make up the Kinect's eyes; from there, the device condenses all the information it collects about your living room into two fields: a color image and a depth map.
The device's slim form factor has forced Microsoft to split up the main board, stacking three boards vertically ('like a small apartment building," notes ifixit.) Microsoft is using a USB-like device connector for the Kinect, which uses 12 watts. (Quite a bit more than 2.5 watts of power provided by a standard USB port, by the way.)
The teardown further determined that the device board features a TI TAS1020B USB audio controller front and center. All four microphones connect to the motherboard with a single cable connector. A Kionix MEMS KXSD9 accelerometer is speculated to be used for inclination and tilt sensing, and possibly image stabilization.
The microelectronic brains of the device pull together a roster of the electronics industry's usual suspects including Wolfson Microelectronics, Fairchild Semiconductor, NEC, Marvell, Analog Devices, Allegro Microsystems, and ST Microelectronics.
As ifixit amusingly notes, without a service manual, repairing the device will be quite a challenge. Microsoft has not made a service manual available, and used four kinds of screws in locking down the console design -- including some "hated security bits": T6, T10, T10 security, and Phillips #0.
As indicated in other reports, including this one from Wired.com, the Kinect is the result of hundreds of millions of dollars of research Microsoft has invested in speech and motion recognition technology.
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