Microsoft has recently launched a service that allows users to program and create robots by plugging in the Kinect hardware, which is designed to provide a full body video game interaction through gesture control.
Enabling a device such as the smartphone to have the functionality of a robot can vastly improve and add more features to the device. For example, a smartphone can potentially be able to access information stored in sites such as Google and Wikipedia, when integrated with Kinect’s gesture and object recognition capabilities.
A gesture-recognition company, Canesta was acquired by Microsoft in 2010. Using chip-level pattern recognition technology, Canesta is designing a smaller version of the Kinect that can easily fit into a handset device.
Upon commercialization of the Canesta chip, Microsoft will be able to reduce the size of Kinect to about 1cm2, thus enabling mobile devices to perform gesture recognition, autonomous navigation among other tasks.
Recently, Google introduced the Android support for robotics and demonstrated the applications of Kinect to its audiences.
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/