This was one of the projects I worked one while working as as researcher at Microsoft Xbox on the team responsible for shipping skeletal tracking and other APIs leveraging the Kinect. It was 11 months before the release of the Xbox One, and our aim was to develop a simple but robust method to engage and disengage with the Kinect. The previous 'wave to engage' gesture on Xbox 360 was robust but difficult to trigger. We wanted something simpler but which maintained the same low false positive rate.

A colleague (Claude Marais) had developed a prototype that combined facial features, body pose and motion to generate and 'intention to interact score' which approximated a user’s intention to interact with the system. The idea was that this 'intention to interact' score could then be combined with a simple gesture to determine engagement, and could be used in concert with a threshold to determine disengagement.

I refined the initial algorithm and then ran a 30-person lab study to compare four engagement algorithms in single and multi-user scenarios. I found that combining intention to interact with a “raise an open hand in front of you” gesture yielded the best results. The latter approach offered a 12% improvement in accuracy and a 20% reduction in time to engage over a baseline “wave to engage” gesture used on the Xbox 360. The results of this work helped to replace the ‘wave to engage’ gesture on Xbox One.