Consumer Reports debunks the 'racist' Kinect

Shortly after the first Microsoft Kinect for Xbox reviews starting appearing in the wee hours last night, another Kinect story cropped up. It seems some testers encountered difficulty in getting the Kinect to identify players with darker skin color.

Consumer Reports did not encounter this issue with the Kinect and facial recognition when we first tested it. But it did remind of us a similar rumor about a "racist" HP laptop—which we debunked—last year. So we decided to test again the Microsoft Kinect with two players of different skin tones, in varying light levels.

Here's what we found: The log-in problem is related to low-level lighting and not directly to players' skin color. Like the HP webcam, the Kinect camera needs enough light and contrast to determine features in a person's face before it can perform software recognition and log someone into the game console automatically.

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/ele...ems-video.html