A few weeks back I had written about a patent that showed Microsoft’s intent to bring Kinect’s body sensing technology to Windows. Someone, somewhere leaked a few internal Windows team slides that made it to the Internet. Martin at Microsoft Journal was the first to write about the information.
A friend on Facebook later pointed me to the whole set of documents that talk about what Microsoft is planning for Windows 8. One of the features is that the PC will automatically resume from sleep and log-in when it sees you. Microsoft calls this “My PC Knows Me” The idea is quite simple, most computers now come with a webcam built-in or have one connected to them. Microsoft will be using this camera for facial detection and along with a proximity sensor the algorithm behind it will do the rest.
The following screenshots show two important things:
- Users can be detected,
- computer will resume upon detection,
- fast user switching will leverage face detection
- once the PC detects the user leaving, the PC will sleep
There’s a lot more where that came from. Hold on.