An unpopular Xbox accessory is now being used to hunt ghosts – here’s how it works

Hunting ghosts with an Xbox accessory? Theoretically yes, but in practice the technology is not error-free. (Image: Carlos – adobe.stock.com)

If you are a dog or cat owner, you probably know how they sometimes stare motionless into the corner. And we rightly ask ourselves: Do animals see ghosts?

You won’t get an answer to this in this article. However, you can use an old Xbox 360 accessory to make ghosts visible – well, at least roughly.

Microsoft’s Kinect camera is not yet allowed to ascend to the heavens of old console tools, but must still live out its existence in this world – as a tool for hunting ghosts.

Connected to a tablet, you can make stick figures visible on the fly.

In 2017, there was a shift in the pit and Microsoft buried the motion-sensitive camera, only to have it dug up again by ghost hunters.

In order to understand why the Kinect shows supposed ghosts, we first have to understand how the camera works.

The Kinect was originally used for thismaking entries on the Xbox 360 without a controller. The lens and associated software detected certain movements and then passed them on to the console as commands.

Technically it works due to the interaction of several components:

• The lens registers itself when someone new comes into the picture.
• A VGA camera helps identify body shapes and faces.
• A complementary metal-oxide semiconductor recognizes spatial depth. This is important because it is intended to avoid recognizing human-like shapes as actual people.
• A light sensor (Structural Light Sensor or SLS) throws a grid in front of the camera in which people and their movements are detected.

The Kinect SLS camera features an infrared light projector with a monochrome CMOS sensor that displays everything as dots in a 3D arrangement. Plugged into a tablet, you can hunt for ghosts live.

Which can be dismissed as a defectis possible evidence of ghosts for believers in ghosts, because why should the sensor show a person if there isn’t one? Precisely because the camera is designed to recognize people and ignore anything that is not a moving body, it should be able to detect (humanoid) ghosts, so the theory goes.

How exactly is this explained? Of course there is no science behind it, so it’s all pure speculation. One theory is that the stick figures are created by the leftover spectral traces of a physical form; a presence of the dead in the place where they once lived, so to speak.

From a scientific perspective, there is no proof of the existence of ghosts.

Although the stick figure skeletons are fascinating As they stand in the room or on the wall, from a technical point of view, doubts can be raised about the reliability of the Kinect, as the Microcontroller Tips page does.

According to the site, only the very first version should the 2010 Kinect, if any, can detect spectral entities, and not the iterations after that, as can also be used with the Xbox One.

The second iteration of the Kinect is even more unreliable at ghost hunting than the first.

So everything that runs into the camera’s infrared matrix is ​​recognized by the camera. The software compares this with an internal database of “typical human” movements. The result is what the software tries to recognize as humanoid and, in the case of a video game, integrates it into the game environment as an avatar.

However, the Kinect software can also get confused. The biggest problem with this:

• The Kinect moves itself. The device was designed to be stationary on or under the TV. Therefore, the program assumes that anything that moves could be a person – and if you carry them by hand through a haunted house, that could potentially be anything (even walls, cupboards or beams).

The more furniture, the higher the error ratebecause there are more infrared reflections that the camera can theoretically perceive as supposed people.

Version 2 of the Kinect is even more error-proneas it uses a different technique for scanning. Explaining them in detail would go beyond the scope of the article, so we’ll leave you with this video here, in which many of the camera’s false-positive reactions are explained.

Link to YouTube content

Do you want to go ghost hunting yourself with the Kinect? You can order a Kinect rig yourself, but be warned: it’s not cheap.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not: The German ghost hunter series “Ghost Files” is recommended for mystery fans. Maxe already wrote an article about this last year. Horror fans should take a look at Prime Video.

The Microsoft Kinect was exhumed and used for ghost hunting. She is not alone: ​​Are you interested in other technology that, according to the Internet, is used to track down ghosts – and what is technically behind it? Feel free to write it in the comments.