Amulet Devices Blog

Archive for March, 2012

Voice control your Macintosh with the Amulet Voice Remote

Fri, March 30, 2012 by Eddy

From time to time, we get enquiries asking whether the Amulet Voice Remote will work on an Apple Macintosh.

We designed the Amulet for use with a PC — primarily for Windows Media Center — and nobody in the company uses a Mac, so this wasn’t a use we had forseen. Since the Amulet dongle appears as a standard USB audio input device, however, I thought there was a good chance the Mac might recognize it.

So, with some assistance from our friends at Jason Clarke Photography, who provided the Mac hardware to play with, I decided to give it a try. (more…)

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Amulet Voice Kinect – Part 2 – OpenCV, HaarTraining and HaarCascade.

Fri, March 2, 2012 by Steve

(If you missed Part 1, which introduced Amulet Voice Kinect, read it here.)

So after deciding to see if HaarCascades would work at all with the depth-stream from Kinect, I figured I needed to give the first test the best chance of success. There was no point making a half-hearted effort, have it fail and then having to have another go because I wouldn’t have known if the failure was down to some fundamental problem with using the depth-stream with HaarCascades or just because I had poor HaarClassifiers. To give the test the best chance of success I would need several thousand depth images containing the object that I needed the classifier to recognise and several thousand negative images not containing the object. I settled on 2000 of each.

(more…)

Tags: Amulet Voice Kinect, Haarcascades, haarclassifiers, kinect for media center, kinect for mediacenter, media center kinect, Mediacenter kinect
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Amulet Voice Kinect – Part 1 – Using HaarClassifiers so you can sit down!

Fri, March 2, 2012 by Steve

You may have previously seen in videos, early versions of the Amulet software being used with Kinect. Now the music functionality is finished and we’re ready to give it away. If it proves popular then we’ll release a paid version that will include all the other functionality currently in our Amulet Voice Remote product and more…

This video shows how it works:

I thought I’d make a posting to the Amulet blog to explain a bit of the background behind how and why “Amulet Voice Kinect” works the way it does. (more…)

Tags: Amulet Voice Kinect, Haarcascades, haarclassifiers, Kinect, kinect for mediacenter, Mediacenter kinect, mediacenter project
Posted in General | Comments Off on Amulet Voice Kinect – Part 1 – Using HaarClassifiers so you can sit down!