PEPSI brought out its new beverage in Japan. It's named PEPSI SHISO. SHISO is Japanese basil. I bought it today and took a sip... and took a picture of it. It seems that PEPSI sometimes sold unique taste beverage for a limited time only such as PEPSI Cucumber and PEPSI Blue Hawaii although I didn't know them. I think Japanese people like things for a limited time only. In addition, they like things which are limited to a certain area. There are many locally limited version of KitKat for example. You can get many types of KitKat in Japan. Friend of mine from the U.S. always buy unique type of snacks which you cannot get in the U.S when she finds it. Anyway you can experience this new type of beverage from PEPSI in Japan.
Microsoft brought out its new technology called Project Natal that is actually marker-less motion capture system. As you can see in this video, it is just amazing. Based on estimated human's pose, a computer can respond in a different way. XBOX is a video game machine but this technology can be used other than game obviously. For example, human-computer interface, security, gesture recognition , remote control and so on. My analysis of this technology is the following. First, I believe they don't use 2D camera but 3D camera so that foreground of the user can be extracted easily. In addition, depth information is really helpful to estimate 3D pose because different poses can create same silhouette. Second, the program is run on a workstation, not on the XBOX so far. Third, it cannot estimate all of the possible poses because human body's articulation is really complicated. However, likely poses can be specified and most of the case, it is sufficient. Forth, I think it cannot do full pose estimation unless the user is facing to the camera. Handling a rotation is really difficult. I know that in this video they show a game of skateboarding. In that case, I think poses are limited in a certain range. For some games, necessary poses are limited so task become easier. Finally, I believe the user has to wear tight clothes. If the user wear a skirt or ample clothes, it fails to estimate poses correctly. Now I realized that I wrote about negative things of this system but let me make my point clear. This is just amazing technology and might change our lives. I welcome any comment for my analysis.
