Face it Tiger..
Banned
The only consensus we've come to, is the consumer's rights are paramount.
anything else and you risking the hammer for yammering on about nothing.
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Sony CEO Kaz Hirai: PS4 is first and foremost a game console
- Thread starter DieH@rd
- Start date
The only consensus we've come to, is the consumer's rights are paramount.
anything else and you risking the hammer for yammering on about nothing.
Manmademan
Member
You're right. using a speaker 6 inches from my face is far more accurate and less prone to errors than one across the room.
Sales this gen are declining because it's the 8th year of the generation, the longest generation since the Atari 2600 was on the market. The market is saturated, especially at this price point. The PS3 is STILL running $270 or so for a new unit- this is unheard of. OVERALL it's outselling last generation.
As for home automation, I can do all that with a tablet, from any room in the house- far better than I can with kinect which is tied to one tv. Hell, I can control my lights, temperature, and turn things off and on without even being home.
There is no use for any of those functions to be tied to the Xbox, they'll just come off half assed against any $99 smartphone or $200 tablet.
Must... resist.... tag.... quote....
Haha! Nice! I admit I'm a firm believer in their ecosystem because its the most compelling to me.
Alas, I haven't posted this much in a thread in this short a period in a long time. Must sleep now. Thanks for the discussion. We live in a very interesting time.
aramanKain
Member
Too late!
Yes I'm sure people will have their home's eletricity network reworked so that it's compatible with Kinect.
That boat passed you by long time ago.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
ralexand said:
The reason is that it works/looks better dramatically and cinematically, not because its more efficient!
The fundamental issue is that when you see this, massive leaps are taken in terms of bridging over any possible ambiguity or contextual confusion. The human brain offers the worlds best speech recognition and that can easily be messed with when words/terms are used that have multiple meanings and contexts.
What's worse, the more clarification and specificity is required from the spoken command the slower and less efficient it gets. The big lie that MS has been pushing with Kinect all along is that the hardware functions as an ersatz mind-reading device, which obviously it can never can be. Recognizing vocal and gestural input is one thing, processing that in a meaningful and human-like manner is another thing altogether.
Voice control is a supplement at best, and a gimmick at worst.
It's never too late to have fun with a tag like that.
I've made a post like this before, but it fits here.
That reminds me of how the holy grail of telecommunication for decades has been video calls. It seemed like there was a new video phone prototype every year during the 90's, and it was the kind of thing even the national news would report on. Yet somehow, even though many of us carry supercomputers that fit in our pockets capable of making video calls from almost everywhere (even the most optimistic sci-fi writers usually didn't go that far), what do most people do with these technological marvels?
We send telegrams. And until recently, most people had to pay a little extra every month for the privilege. Why? Because it's faster, more convenient, and more polite (more accurately, less disturbing to the person on the other end). And just plain more efficient.
jeff_rigby
Banned
For the tech savvy everything you say is correct but for my 81 year old mother it's possible to correctly interpret what she is incorrectly trying to say (ambiguity or contextual confusion) and there is no way to correct for pushing a wrong remote button. If at least some of the words she is using are correct you can have an AI routine that suggests choices or performs the correct operation. Eventually my Mom will learn to use the right words. Using the remote may eventually result in it being in the wrong input with CC turned on and a large black box in the center of the screen.
On the other hand if there is no AI and no room for error in the words she uses then it will be worse that useless. It has to be polite and not raise it's voice or sigh after explaining the same thing multiple times. My Mom and many non-technical people think they can operate equipment without knowing how it works. It is possible but you have to memorize, if you understand the tech, you don't have to memorize commands...it's intuitive, or should be.
Here is what I would consider a compelling experience:
I don't have to change inputs on my TV, all my shows are brought to me through one interface (like Xbox one is touting). But, it would need to interface to my DVR and see all my shows that are recorded, and let me set recordings. I would also want it to hook up to my NAS to stream movies and shows from my personal collection.
It then takes all of that - live TV, recorded TV, on demand, NAS, and presents it to me in an intelligent way so I don't need to spend time navigating to shows, they are right there.
MS is doing a lot right with their offering, but personally it needs at minimum to handle DVRs well, and preferably home network content too. Even if it is only a small set of DVRs, if the experience is good enough I'd switch suppliers
jeff_rigby
Banned
Then everything needs metadata as part of a known area of the file be it picture, Movie or Music. This is starting to happen but in the mean time Gracenote is a way to identify and possibly add metadata to older commercial movies and music but older home movies and pictures will need manual editing.
Sony, Google and others have been pushing for Metafile standards.
You could certainly do the same kind of thing for remote button presses - add an interpretation engine that assists when it detects that someone may be fumbling with the controls. Either way, there's an expectation that the user at least knows enough of the machine's vocabulary for there to be something to interpret. Which, for the chronically tech illiterate, is far far from a guarantee.
That might be pretty close to what you'd have with a PS3 and Torne. Don't know how navigation is handled, but it does let the PS3 act as a DVR and an NAS for other devices, even recording shows while you play games.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
jeff_rigby said:
This is a great example of its use as a supplemental function; I mean that with no disrespect to mobility-impaired people, just that for a mass-market product the people who will see the most benefit will be a minority.
My pet peeve with Kinect is that for a device purportedly intended to broaden gameplay possibilities, the need to constrain and format user behaviour such that the machine can understand the input without ambiguity has a far more narrowing effect on the design than using standard nominative input.
PrivateWHudson
Member
I would have to add one more point to this list (maybe the xbox does this, but I didn't hear about it). The one box would need to know what channels I get free both in the live list, and on demand. Nothing like dining a movie searching though fios just to find out I don't get any of the channels, or it's a pay movie on demand.
zomgbbqftw
Banned
Amazingly Xbone doesn't have DVR functionality. Seems insane to go on and on about TV this and that while skipping the best feature of TVs that even Windows Media Centre could do...
jeff_rigby
Banned
It's hard to convert HDMI input to video. With RVU and ATSC 2.0, NRT as DVR is a requirement for Guides, XTV games and movies. So no doubt DVR is a planned ability. Marlin and schemes to flag saved movies with a erase by date is part of the PS3 now. These schemes are listed as part of the feature set enabled by Trustzone apps.
The PS4 may not have a HDMI pass-thru, it may rely on RVU as Sony's Nanse is a cable and OTA RVU Gateway device with DVR.
All the new home automation stuff works by Wifi
It'll be tough to let you watch one thing while recording another with only one video input. Also, I think the rules on what can be recorded are a little stricter with HDMI; any cable box that indiscriminately encrypts the output on all channels won't be able to be recorded at all (at least, not if MS wants to keep their HDMI license).
they don't even need to record it. You already have to hook a box up to it, just use the network remote support that eg Tivo has, I think comcast boxes have, and Sky in the UK. You can access live guide data, recordings, series links (for Tivo) etc all over the LAN and then present that using the Xbox. You can also start playback of recordings, set recordings, and change channels without the need for an IR blaster.
IMO not having that puts a giant hole in the middle of MS's claim to be the centre of the living room.
PrivateWHudson
Member
Is the kinect wifi? I have power and hdmi hardwired above the fireplace. Would I need to open up the wall to run a kinect cable? Also, the wire would need to be about 25 feet long.
Yeah, but you need protocol layers on-top of the WiFi for it to actually do anything. I don't know if there are standard protocols for home automation yet.
By "compatible" I mean install the proper HW. I didn't mean that Kinect uses some proprietary stuff for that. How many households have automation panels?
jeff_rigby
Banned
True for HDMI in, only one channel. There are multiple reasons why HDMI shouldn't be used for DVR as you pointed out. RVU would be IPTV streams and you can have a RVU gateway device with 6 tuners and a home network can support 6 streams at the same time. There is no reason why multiple channels couldn't be recorded at the same time while watching another.
So neither will have DVR until after June 2014 or later? Sony's PS4 might not have any Google TV functionality until after that date either. They should announce it though. Nanse shows they were aware of RVU, the 2010 FCC mandate for RVU and PS3 firmware 3.21 (2010) adding DTCP-IP to DLNA = RVU functionality.
They still haven't updated the PS3 DLNA software to properly support the Menus. If the RVU server is careful in sending only 1-2 lines of text that the PS3 can display, it will work. Still no accepting a DLNA redirect from a handheld.
lionkitten
Banned
You sound like my great grandfather talking about horseless carriages or the guy on Downtown Abbey talking about electricity and the telephone in their house.
Yeah, I mean XB1 allowing you to control a TV, a cable box and itself is as big as cars, telephone or electricity.
Not at all, which is one of the reasons I think the analogy I replied to is imprecise.
Manmademan
Member
or as someone else mentioned video calls, voice search, and motion controls...all of which were marketed as the next big thing, but rarely see use beyond the initial novelty.
Why do you think TV's still use remote controls instead of voice control then?
Have you ever used voice recognition software?
Voice recognition can be very convenient but there are 3 very important conditions for it to properly work:
1. You need to make a personal profile and calibrate the software for your voice.
2. You need intelligent software which can learn from it's mistakes and train words.
3. You need a quality headset or microphone (preferable one with a build-in audio card) with noice reduction. Eg. a philips microphone LFH3500 easily costs about $200.
The setup MS provides with the Xbone won't be anything but wonky.
I hope they don't have a command which can accidentally shut down the system while you're playing.
Interfectum
Member
I want to be able to watch the trailer for Lord of the Rings while skyping with my mother while watching Game of Thrones all on my TV at the same time or I'm not buying.
Marty Chinn
Member
It's not hard to scrape metadata though. XBMC has been doing it for years.
But it is precise now because all we have is a general idea. Until you can list ALL the features to do a comparison, you can't quantify which one is proportionally leaning one way or the other. At this point in time, everyone is being premature about what is what because nobody has the full picture yet and we won't for the next 5 months.
lastflowers
Banned
because tv makers don't give flying hoot, and want to focus only on visuals/cost?M°°nblade;60389005 said:
It isn't that premature, like I said in my previous reply to you. We just can't scratch off MS's strategy since 2010 just because. With this reveal they not only confirm that their shift continues, but that the console was practically designed around it.
They will show games at E3, that's a no-brainer, but E3 is not enough for them unfortunately. They need to show that they have a commitment to keep releasing quality first party content throughout next gen, and be consistent about it. I have to take things at face value right now because all we've had since Kinect has been talk, nothing more.
Here's some science fucking fiction for you:
It's 3am, the wife's asleep, and the husband's going to clearly speak out loud "Xbox, weather channel".
In real life he'd use a remote, and it wouldn't be the weather channel.
Marty Chinn
Member
They're on record of investing 1 billion in development for first party titles. That's nothing to take lightly. You can argue that they're late about doing that, but you have to at least admit they're committed.
That is a worthless marketing number that tells us nothing: They will have to show some results, so far they aren't exactly convincing people of their actual efforts.
TVs are sold with built-in voice controls: Few care about that kind of functionality. Pressing a button is easier and doesn't disturb other people in the room. The Xbone overlay won't be able to provide much cable box functionality anyway for many people, remotes aren't obsoleted by the Xbone.
Marty Chinn
Member
E3 has not friggin happened yet and we're already hanging them by the neck making bold claims that they don't have games, they're not committed about games and so forth. I would make a strong argument that MS didn't invest into first parties like Sony did during the last and current generation and Microsoft is way behind as a result, but I'm not doubting their investment and opening of studios, and their commitment to building first party content. They're just late and behind there. People are throwing around loose terms of commitment and focus that you can't quantify from the information we know at this time. It's silly jumping to conclusions is what is going on.
Let's be realistic here. Just like car interfaces, TV interfaces are pretty much shit. I have yet to see a TV that has a quality interface. It's hard to say people don't care when there aren't good options.
angelcage87
Member
No, with the power of kinect, you only need your hands to switch to the weather channel late at night, here's the input :
They were "committed" this gen too, remember? I can't dismiss a 1 billion investment for games of course, but sadly, I'm not convince that most of that investment will be for non-kinect games or that the effort will continue later on.
If we go with what we have right now, it's not that difficult to understand why many people are completely skeptical. We'll see either way.
MightyHedgehog
Member
One, we don't know the price yet. Two, if you've seen the demo of how it is intended to work, the integration isn't just compositing a universal overlay onto separate feeds with some CEC control over HDMI-connected devices/IR-blaster/network, it's that the software can act accurately on voice commands that say 'XBOX, play X-Files' and then it switches to the channel that is playing exactly that at the moment. There's no device or service that even works remotely as stupid-simple as that right now. Not saying that the market is begging for easy interaction like that, but the world was never begging for nearly anything consumer electronic-related that was popular before now. It's really the first time a console will come built-in with a consideration for what the user already likely has. Obviously, there are exclusive offerings on top of that, as well as anything else MS wants to throw in there that they haven't revealed yet or are going to offer in the future.
Those looking for just television-integration won't have need for something as expensive and large as a X1, but for people who want a new games machine to go with, it's a million miles above what what Apple, Roku, or Google offer and, at least, in the same league as PS4. The big thing with this approach is that even if you don't give a flying fuck about the television end of things and are part of the streaming-only crowd, this system should be competitively priced against PS4 and have big new next-gen games. If I were MS, I would leverage my warchest and ability to have a completely focused television/entertainment side of tech and creatives to support that side of X1 and simply bulk up the gaming side so that you could effectively address both the gamer and early adopter as well as everyone else. You only need to have the games to make the most demanding gamer happy. If MS comes at everyone with a load of excellent titles at launch, it will be every bit as compelling to the gamer as a game-focused PS4.
lastflowers
Banned
Why not have both?
Marty Chinn
Member
No they weren't. It was clear as day that Microsoft didn't give a shit about first party titles. They relied on a couple of IPs and made no investment into other studios. They were heavily relying on those IPs, third parties, and Xbox Live community to keep people on there. It was night and day with what Sony was doing with first party compared to Microsoft.
TheLegendary
Member
The company is on the brink of complete failure. They are not in a great position
