Oh come on. You knew this was going to happen. I just had to stop
integrating people's code long enough to actually make the damn blog
post. So let's ruin the end of our nice 4-day weekend (in the US, at
least) by taking some new technology and donginating it a bit.
The kinect. If you haven't heard about it yet, you're probably not
reading this blog right now, because people interested in dildo tech
are usually also at least semi-interested in real tech, and this has
been all the fuck over the real tech news lately. Not only that,
there's an open source, cross platform driver set available so
you can do whatever your perverted little heart wants with this poor
piece of future, thus continuing the human condition of "not being
able to have nice things." (Full disclosure: Some of the code in those
drivers is my fault, as is the code integration.)
But, for those of you have haven't read up yet, here's a quick kinect
overview.
Most cameras produce 1 image. It's made up of color information.
The kinect produces two images. Color information, and depth
information. It does this by projecting evil rays onto whatever is in
front of it and then seeing how much the evil distorts and using that
to calculate distance. Anyone that calls this IR is lying. Being hit
by the kinect camera is evil, and is a sin.
The evil looks like this:
The result is fucking awesome, and also gives you depth. Evil depth.
For an idea of how we used to have to do depth, check out this video
of a creepy gesture project I did in 2007.
And now, here's a picture of me doing an impression of the dude from
Indiana Jones that got the medallion burned into his hand, in a
combination RGB and depth image from the kinect.
So you have your normal color picture, as well as how far away things
are in the picture, which means we can easily cut out what's in front
of and behind a body and just see the body, and then spend our
computing power figuring things out about that certain body's position
and movement instead of just trying to find it with all of the
background clutter. Instead of having to do all the weirdness with
the calibration and the dots in the video, now we just say "Only look
for things like between 2 and 2.5 feet away from the camera", and the
camera goes "ok" and we expect to find a hand in there and we just
have to look at the depth outline. This is WAY easier and less
mathtastic than the dots. Less mathtasticness for finding hands means
more mathtasticness for shiny.
There's some microphones on the kinect too but we don't know how to
use them yet so I'm just gonna ignore them for now.
The question arises: But how can I fuck it?
Well, you can't fuck it like, directly. The airvents are pretty small,
and honestly, it's a camera. I /guess/ it could be insertable
(lord knows that never stopped anyone with a wiimote),
but... no. Dildo cams exist for a reason.
It's an electronic eyeball. And really, how often do you stick it in
someone's eyeball?
Put your hand down, Japan.
The next question arises: But how can I fuck with it?
Ok, better question. There's a few different sex things you could do
with the kinect. But let's look at what other people have come up with
in the past few weeks first.
--
MotionSwinger is basically a joke website with pictures from
Second Life that's not all that interesting outside of the following
block:
let Kinect scan in your whole body and see how you and your willie
rank in comparison to other motion swinger Users (Internet & Xbox
Live required)
Now, there's a few reasons this isn't very easily possible, but I'll
get into that later.
The Kinect Titty Tracker brings up a lot of interesting
properties of the kinect. First off, it's using depth to find body
shape in order to know where to put the images. This would be a much
more difficult problem with just an RGB camera due to trying to figure
out where the body in the picture was with all of the background
clutter behind it. Now you can just use depth to find the structure of
the body, and go from there, without having to worry about lighting or
relative position of nipples or whatever. This could certainly be
improved upon by isolating the body depth, then culling out the rest
of the RGB image to do image based analysis on the body alone (i.e. to
actually find nipples via depth plus coloration/patterns), but we get
proof of concept with this, as well as titties. Proof of titty
concept.
--
So what can the kinect bring to sex? Well, probably not a good real
time rendering of your cock, or strap-on, or really any genitalia a
usable way for pornography. Why? Because that's not really what it was
made for.
Microsoft put a ton of work into making the kinect track the human
body as a whole, so you can play games by jumping and running and
generally acting the fucking fool and feel like you're in the game
instead of just sad. Genitalia, for the most part, are not a major
geometric feature of the human body when taken in perspective of
physical size (as opposed to say, genitalia perspective in relation to
the ego, where they may actually make up more than 100%). Neither are
they normally used in the control of video games, be they rated
everyone or
AO. Not to say that experiment hasn't been tried, but it didn't turn out too well,
and we're probably a few years off of the video game market being
ready for Mike Tyson's Super Cockslap-Out. So why even try to track
that small part when you're interested in the whole body? You may be
able to see it, but it won't work well.
But, since this is a psuedo-science blog, let's sudo-science some shit
together to make this seem researched.
This is your run-of-the-mill Doc Johnson Vac-u-loc dildo, same kind
I'm sure most of my readers with a few fucking machines strewn around
the house. It's around 5.75", so we can call this "average". No,
really, if you are so appendaged, feel free to hold yourself up to
that not-to-scale image and feel insanely larger than average. I'll wait.
Ok, all done?
Anyways, the first thing we have to remember is that we have a
boundary of around 18" from the camera that we have to stay out of,
otherwise we violate the focal depth and don't get a reading. So,
let's see what sort of depth information we get at 18".
This is just a colorized version of what the depth data gives us. So
you can see the dildo in front of the background. Great if we wanted
to know where the dildo was, but...
This is a point cloud rendering of the dildo. Each point represents a
point of distance in space, and it's colorized based on the RGB image
we get back. Remember, we're only getting depth information from a
single source, therefore we fall prey to THE SHADOWS insert scary
music here. You can see that in this rendering. You get the front of
the cock, sorta...
But no back. And if I weren't a lazy bastard, I'd take video of the
rendering and you'd see how much information we lose from the depth
camera scaling too. It's staticy as hell.
Not only that, you then have a common problem of looking at the human
body from a single point when trying to render a scene:
self-occlusion.
For instance, check out when happens when I stick out my tongue and
take incredibly crappy images of the resulting point cloud.
From the front, we're ok. Ish. Sorta.
But from the side, where things get interesting because hey we've got
depth now, my tongue occludes my chin and I become freaky no-chin guy!
Now gimme some candy! (Yes I realize halloween was last month but it's
never too late for an Adam Sandler SNL reference). 3D porn, while
doable with this, won't be very interesting.
In short, porn is about sex, but for many customers it's also about
being able to see the sex in a way that doesn't make you think "Wait,
why does her arm detach completely when her boob is in front of it" or
"why does he have a penis shaped hole in his stomach". The pattern the
kinect uses to get depth data is made for picking up full bodies to
control video games, and therefore isn't quite so good at picking up
minutiae about those bodies.
However, none of this will or should stop people from trying. I bet
we'll see kinect porn and possibly kinect skype services within the
month. Just don't come crying to me when you lose side or under boob
to breast shadowing or taint viewing due to ball blockage. Yes, there
will be depth, but it will be very inaccurate and noisy and I think
most people will just want their 2D image back. We've had a few
millenia to get that one right, after all.
--
Now, what can we do with the body parts that ARE big enough for the
kinect to register? That's where the really interesting part comes in.
First off, let's start with this TUIO interface.
So you may be thinking, "But qDot, what's interesting about this?"
Well, mainly the fact that it's easier to find gestures thanks to the
depth information here. In this video, fists are found via depth
thresholding, which is a bit of a hack, but still shows that when we
say "only look at picture information that's at a certain depth", we
can do cool things quickly.
Let's apply that to sex. Sexual manuevers usually make for somewhat
deliberate gestures, as the following Whitest Kids You Know video
shows.
Now, usually when we talk about sex toy control interfaces, we need
hardware. Someone to stick it in, or stick in, or whatever, that has
sensors in it to tell us how far what got stuck where. Usually, that
hardware is also shit.
The kinect alliviates the need for having hardware, because now as
long as we have a shot of the "action", as it were, we can use that
"gesture" as a control. Not only that, the gesture itself is the
toy. Or you could employ a toy under the gesture. The possibilities,
they may or may not halt.
With masturbation, however, the kinect does not make this a trivially
solved problem. Due to the close contact of the hand with the body,
possibly with some inanimate object in between, there will still have
to be some calibration and thresholding to figure out exactly where
the genitalia versus the hand versus the surrounding body parts
are. We'll have the image and the depth data, but it's not like the
above above video where the hands are being held far out from the
body, which is a situation the kinect is made for. Masturbation and
general self-manipulation is something that's out of the kinect's
normal operating procedure, but I'm sure we'll figure something
out. We're smart and bored, after all.
Finally, there's avatar overlays. Now that we can very easily know
where your head, body, arms, etc are, we can put images and overlays
on that to turn you into whatever non-realistic, cartoony thing it is
you want to be to get off. The above picture is actually from
logitech's quickcam avatar suite, but this is so happening on kinect
like so ASAP it's not even funny. The above titty tracker video
is pretty much proof of concept right there.
--
In summary, the camera can watch you masturbate, easily know you
are masturbating, and use information that to control shit, be it
your text editor or someone else's love device. It can also make
bad 3d porn of you while you masturbate and control, or it can overlay
cartoony shit on you so you don't have to be you while you're doing
whatever it is you do to yourself if you're into that to control that
thing that other person is into.
I don't think I've really broken any new ground on the already
over-done subject of sex and 3d cameras here. I'm sure the pervs of
the world to prove me a sexual luddite once again. At least, I hope
they will.
