#453. Motion Tracking Technology

Technology. Innovation. The advancement of science through sagacious and extraordinary minds thinking outside the known, thereby creating the unfathomable and ultimately improving the condition of mankind.

Many of these men, considered the proverbial 'mad scientist' for their eccentricities, perceived and put in motion the first inkling of what we take for granted today. What started as a byproduct of a back-of-the-napkin sketch became technology that slowly transformed society.

Motion Tracking Technology is racially exclusive

Though metallurgy is largely absent from the history of Africa and 'mad scientists' don't necessarily conjure up images of Black people (unless you include Fictional Black History Month characters, such as Eddie Murphy's Profesor Klump), the Super Soaker is a gadget that sprang forth from a Black mind like Athena to vastly advance water cannon technology.

Today the best minds are no longer bothered by the burden of thinking outside the box to create awe-inspiring machines or technologies that mediocre minds could scarcely dream of, but instead work upon improving Muslim relations or creating the most realistic video game experience outside of Tron.

Video games are a medium that rivals the film industry in revenue and product advancement through technological innovation, and sadly, the designers of most of these games are white.

Computer and software engineers have the habit of being a monochromatic bunch, devoid of the blessed diversity that is the bedrock of Black Run America (BRA).This is a crisis for the video game industry, with a general lack of Black people involved in the actual coding and designing of the virtual worlds that so many people spend countless hours immersed in.

Recently, Microsoft released a new gaming console called the Kinect, a motion-sensing based technology that seeks to cut into Nintendo's market share of the next generation gaming devices (Wii). Problems arose quickly in the testing phase of the product:

Source: In testing the Kinect, two dark-skinned GameSpot employees had problems getting the system's facial recognition features to work. 

What we heard: Part of Microsoft's $500 million marketing push for Kinect includes positioning it as an accessible entertainment device for all audiences. However, it may be more accessible to some than others.

While testing out the Kinect, two dark-skinned GameSpot employees experienced problems with the system's facial recognition abilities. The system recognized one employee inconsistently, while it was never able to properly identify the other despite repeated calibration attempts. However, Kinect had no problems identifying a third dark-skinned GameSpot employee, recognizing his face after a single calibration. Lighter-skinned employees were also consistently picked up on the first try.

It's important to note that the problems were only experienced with the system's facial recognition feature and don't prevent users from playing Kinect games. Skeletal tracking, a primary means of controlling games with Kinect, appeared to work the same for all GameSpot employees. 

The system's inability to recognize a user only means that he or she would need to sign in manually and some games' features may not work properly as a result. For example, when a second player joins in to Kinect Adventures during the title's drop-in, drop-out multiplayer, the system can't bring up that player's proper in-game avatar automatically if it can't identify the new user first. 

 PC Magazine quickly went to bat for Microsoft, downplaying the racial significance of this horrific oversight.

This isn't the first time that a technology has failed to identify Black people, as HP came under fire just last year when a motion-tracking webcam had a similar inability to track Black people:

Can Hewlett-Packard's motion-tracking webcams see black people? It's a question posed on a now-viral YouTube video and the company says it's looking into it.

In the video, two co-workers take turns in front of the camera -- the webcam appears to follow Wanda Zamen as she sways in front of the screen and stays still as Desi Cryer moves about.

HP acknowledged in a statement e-mailed to CNN that the cameras may have issues with contrast recognition in certain lighting situations. The webcams, built into HP's new computers, are supposed to keep people's faces and bodies in proportion and centered on the screen as they move.


The video went viral over the weekend, garnering more than 400,000 YouTube page views and a slew of comments on Twitter.

It was something neither Zamen nor Cryer expected to happen.

Zamen said she and Cryer, her co-worker, were playing around with the computer at work and testing it when they stumbled upon the facial recognition feature.

Cryer and Zamen said they were laughing when they realized the camera followed her and not him.
"We thought it was pretty funny, we thought it was hilarious," Zamen said.

So they made a video, which they planned to just share with friends on Facebook and YouTube. There was no script, no rehearsal, just two friends filming what they thought was a hilarious software glitch.
So again, the two took turns in front of the camera.

"As soon as my blackness enters the frame, it stopped," Cryer says in the video.

That new advances in technology would fail to recognize Black people in 2010 is a sure sign of a discriminatory strain running through the blood of computer scientists designing this exclusionary equipment.

The lack of Black people studying computer science makes one wonder whether the inability for motion sensing technology to "see" Black people isn't nature's way of making a cruel point:

Black people are so underrepresented in computer science that the term "black computer scientist" might be considered an oxymoron.

African-Americans represent about 13 percent of the U.S. population but less than 6 percent of all faculty members at American colleges and universities. In the field of computer science, however, they make up only 1.3 percent of the faculty, according to the Computing Research Association's widely used "Taulbee Survey Report."

Given the evolving role that information technology plays in our day-to-day lives, one would think that more blacks would be pursuing computer science. So why are we not producing American-born black computer-science professors? Since the two of us fall into that category (and are, we hope, professionally successful), we hear this question all too often: Why aren’t there more like us?

The presumed answers are many. Are black students not interested in or adequately exposed to computing fields? Are they not prepared? Or, as some may wonder (but will never say), do black students lack the aptitude to succeed in computer science? {snip} Is it unreasonable to assume that students would not gravitate to a field that has so few people who look like them?

Several scholarly studies have suggested that African-Americans tend to select occupations in which they have had contact with successful black role models. {snip}

We wonder if black students receive different instruction. Among science and math graduate students, 17 percent of black students reported publishing journal articles, while the figures for other groups were 49 percent for Asians, 42 percent for Hispanics, and 47 percent for whites, according to Three Magic Letters: Getting to Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

 Miles Dyson is just a movie character. In reality, Stuff Black People Don't Like includes motion tracking technology, for it is designed by white people and habitual fails to identify Black people, excluding them participating in joys of innovation.

Black people always have the Super Soaker to fall back on, if motion tracking technology continues to leave them wet from the perspiration that flows from Black rage toward exclusionary innovations.