Month: January 2017

Xbox Closes a Milestone Year in 2016 with an Exceptional Year Ahead for Gamers

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Happy New Year! As we start off the new year, we thought we would take some time to look back at a great 2016 and look forward to what will be an exceptional 2017 for Xbox gamers. We were privileged to celebrate the 15-year anniversary of Xbox in November, but what made 2016 most special was laying out our vision for gaming at E3 2016, delivering a new version of Xbox One along with great new games and services for you to play on the device(s) of your choice and seeing terrific response from gamers worldwide this holiday. In fact,… Continue reading Xbox Closes a Milestone Year in 2016 with an Exceptional Year Ahead for Gamers→

Project-Infrared, Kinect and the HoloLens

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Today’s post highlights an article written by Jason Odom that takes one of the most interesting Kinect topics, motion tracking, and brings it into the future with the HoloLens…

Set Up Project-Infrared & Add Full Body Motion Tracking to the HoloLens Using a Kinect

Thanks to Project-Infrared, there’s now a pretty straightforward way to add motion tracking to the HoloLens: Connect it to a Kinect.

Wavelength LLC’s created a way to get the Microsoft Kinect working as a motion-tracking input device for HoloLens, which my colleague Adam Dachis wrote about last week. A few days later, the CEO of Wavelength LLC Kyle “G” and his team released Project-Infrared to the community as an open-source github repository.

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Project-Infrared is a motion tracking system that uses Microsoft’s Kinect and HoloLens. The Kinect takes the input from the movement of the user and transmits an avatar, mimicking the user’s movement and displaying it on the Microsoft HoloLens.

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Why Motion Tracking?

As developers, designers, and creators, we are always looking for new and exciting ways to interact with our various chosen platforms. With more input options comes new and unique solutions to the problems we are trying to solve. Motion capture has been used by the film and game industries for years, due to its highly expressive detail—everything from hand movements to body language and facial features are picked up and mimicked on screen.

What Is the Solution for Us?

Enter motion-tracking, which tracks a user’s entire body so they can control their device without a specialized suit, and in a minimal amount of space. Compared to motion capture, motion tracking is a relatively young technology and far less sophisticated. For it to evolve, we need people developing ideas and new use cases.

The only way to do that is by building on each other’s successes. Wavelenghth’s Kyle G. says he released the code for their Project-Infrared as open source in response to the needs of an educator in the community: “I can’t deny students learning. It’s part of my ‘no school left behind’ belief.”

With that in mind, let’s walk through how to set this project up, and what we can do with it.

First, let us gather what we will need:

Now I am assuming a working knowledge of Unity and HoloLens development in general, including the ability to build, compile, and deploy code to the HoloLens or HoloLens Emulator.

Set Up Your Hardware and Install Project-Infrared

Now Let’s Try It Out : Testing the Application

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After a few seconds of the Unity Logo and a short wait for the data to reach the HoloLens, you should see something similar to the image below.

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The Doctor is In… Virtual space!

Congrats! You now have working motion-tracking. Dance around and see Mortimer dance as well. In its current state that isn’t a ton of options to dig into, but there are 3 avatars you can try. Look in the Avatar Source View, you can change the Avatar Asset Name from Mortimer to Jill or ParasiteLStarkie by typing the name into the input field.

Project Information URL: http://hololens.reality.news/how-to/set-up-project-infrared-add-full-body-motion-tracking-hololens-using-kinect-0174419/

Contact Information:

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Batches and Batches of Bots

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Is 2017 going to be the Year of Bots? I don’t know about that, but here’s a batch of great resources, links, examples and more for building Bots.

First, Simon Michael gathered a boat load of Bot links and resources…

Microsoft Bot Framework Resources

 

“There are quite a few great tutorials, samples and videos around on Microsoft Bot Framework.

I thought it would be useful to keep a list on these running within this blog for easy reference.

This is meant to help and is not an endorsed list of recommendations (although there is great material here šŸ™‚)

I will keep adding to this list as new material appears and please contact me if you think I am missing something!

There are 5 sections:

****  GENERAL BOT FRAMEWORK LINKS ****

**** BOT FRAMEWORK TUTORIALS *****

**** BOT FRAMEWORK SAMPLES ****

**** BOT ‘SMARTS’ – ADDING INTELLIGENCE TO YOUR BOT ****

**** BOT AND COGNITIVE API CASE STUDIES  ****

… [Click through to see them all]

Next we have Benjamin Perkins who has written up a great guide to Bot samples on GitHub

C# Bot Builder Samples on GitHub

 

“A good way to get ideas and some coding best practice is to look at some examples, there are many of them using C# hosted on GitHub here.

I wanted to walk through what they are so I can for myself find or discover some new ideas and best practices for this, as I am interested in creating a #chatbot like I discussed in these links

Some samples, the name and my description of them

…” [Click through to see them all]

Kate Michel delves into building one of the more common uses for bots…

Building a Cognitive Customer Service Bot

 

“If there is something being talked about with more passion and frequency than “customer 360” or “internet of things” it is certainly “bots.” Bots are taking shape to play a significant role in our lives and have a vital role to play in customer service interactions. In the past, bots or virtual assistants were considered little more than a chat-based IVR system but more and more these A.I. entities are becoming smarter, more helpful and empowering us to do greater things.

When it comes to customer service the bot conversation is simple: One bot can do the work of 1,000 agents at a fraction of the price taking less time to train. As customer expectations for response times, 24/7 availability and simplicity increase, bots are fast becoming an integral part of support teams around the world.

This blog will illustrate some of the ways in which Microsoft Bots can be built to facilitate customer conversations like never before.

Sample code provided in this blog is written to the Microsoft Bot Framework V3. I code my bots using Node.js, please see my colleague Geoff Innis’ blog for related .NET content and samples.

Bots are like Onions

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Just like an excellent Customer Service Representative, a Cognitive Service Bot is comprised of layers of intelligence. The foundation rests on the Microsoft Bot Framework, an extensible platform that allows you to easily build bots and connect them to several (10+) channels so that your bot is as responsive to customer needs and touch points as a real agent.

The Bot Framework consists of a number of components including the Bot Builder SDK, Developer Portal and the Bot Directory. Features of the Bot Builder SDK include dialogs, prompts, built-in connection to Artificial Intelligence frameworks and the ability to run on nearly any bot platform. I choose to build my bots using the Bot Builder for Node.js.

There is an excellent beginning tutorial to get started with a “Hello World” bot within the Bot Framework Documentation here.

While a basic bot can be a lot of fun, Customer Service has unique challenges and a bot tasked with having a conversation with real customers needs to be more versatile and intelligent than your average bot.

…” [Click through to see the entire post, with all the details]

Last, but not least, Peter Daukintis, Friend of the Blog, shares creating a Bot with the MS Health API…

MS Health Bot Tutorial

 

This is a step-by-step guide to writing an Bot in C# using the Bot Framework Connector SDK .NET template. You will need to have collected some sleep data using a Microsoft Band and have had that synchronised up to the Microsoft cloud as this tutorial uses the Bot Framework to provide access to that data.

1) Install prerequisite software

2) Download and install the Bot Application template

3) Open Visual Studio

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Microsoft Health API…

Health API Helpers

LUIS ….

Bot Implementation…

Summary

This tutorial has illustrated how to put together a real-world, useful bot not just be providing a text input interface to an API but allowing the user to use their natural voice input to query the aggregated data. Hopefully, this will leave you with some ideas about how to implement a bot for your own scenario.”

[You’re going to want to click through to see the source and more]

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